Georgia’s 8,000-year wine history and natural wine revolution: sample rare organic wines from the birthplace of viticulture

Georgia is a wine lover’s dream destination, with 525 grape varietals and millennia of viticultural experience. With Soviet restrictions gone, the country using its grapes and traditional organic methods to make some unique wines

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Georgia’s Kakheti wine region is surrounded by the Caucasus Mountains.

Published: 8:30pm, 11 Jul 2018Updated: 6:07pm, 12 Jul 2018

To meet Georgia’s most acclaimed winemaker, I have driven through deciduous rainforest and semi-desert scrub. “In western Georgia we have clay over limestone, plus granite in the north and volcanic rock in the south,” explains John Wurdeman of Pheasant’s Tears vineyards. “Combine this terroir with 525 grape varieties across varying altitudes, and you have the world’s most diverse winemaking area.”

John Wurdeman is Georgia’s most acclaimed winemaker.

Quite simply, the birthplace of viticulture is a boozy Garden of Eden.

To take advantage of the regional variations, Pheasant’s Tears operates seven small vineyards across a nation half the size of Fujian province. Some of the grapes are harvested during the August heat. Other lowland varietals are plucked during the first frosts of December. Compare that to Bordeaux, where most grapes – and they use only three main varieties – are collected during a single week in October.

It wasn’t always thus. During Soviet occupation, only four grape varieties were planted to create homogenised wines for the Russian market. Fortunately, Georgia’s mountainous terrain made this policy impossible to police. A sheer lack of investment kept soils fertiliser-free. Now Georgian winemaking traditions are emerging just as the market is turning to timeless, natural and organic products.,

Wines from across Pheasant’s Tears seven vineyards scattered across Georgia.

Natural wines are still made in qvevri as they were 8,000 years ago. These torpedo sized ceramic pots are buried underground to take advantage of the more consistent temperature. “Unlike stainless steel tanks, qvevri have no right-angles,” Wurdeman explains to visitors in Georgia’s Kakheti wine region. “This allows the fermenting wine to mature in constant motion, without a metal taint.”

The resulting wines are thereunsullied and unoaked, and “speak Georgian” at every turn.

We ascend to the Pheasant’s Tears rooftop for a panoramic degustation. First up is a 2017 Bakurtsikhe Rkatsiteli, normally a white wine, but in this case, turned pink by six months of skin contact. It comes from vines that are tilled on horseback to ensure that no tractor fumes pollute the grapes.