Georgia is almost certainly the birthplace of wine. it certainly has the longest continuously running wine industries in the world.
And by longest, we are talking 8000 years.
So with all that practice you'd assume they have got a few things right - and they most definitely have.
I started drinking Georgian wine because I was interest in Classical Greece. I'd read that Georgian wines, make in qvevri - huge amphora - was the closest one could get to wines that the ancient Greeks would have drank.
I agree with Atticus Finch that one cannot fully understand someone till you have walked a mile in their shoes - or in this case - downed a few glasses of their wine. Drinking Georgian wines, especially the orange qvevri made wines helped me get a little closer to the ancient people I was trying to understand.
But it also introduced me to some genuinely fantastic winemaking and to grapes I would not have experienced any other way. One is saperavi, the grape in this lovely bottle of Mukuzani Special Reserve from Tbilvino.
Saperavi is one of very few red grapes which have red flesh as well as red skins and produces wines of a very dark, rich colour - and flavour too.
This particular bottle has a backstory. A number of years ago, teaching classical Studies, I mentioned to some senior students that Georgian wines were the closest we can get to what the ancient Greeks enjoyed. I must have waxed a little lyrical because on the last day of term a large present; the unmistakable size, shape and weight of a box of wine; appeared on my desk.
Sourcing the wines in it cannot have been easy - I am very grateful they went to the trouble!
This particular bottle really was fantastic. Nearly ten years old, I am convinced it would have last quite some time more in the cellar. It definitely needed some air but after that went down very well with the devilled kidney's I had been cooked. It is all dark fruits, including a lot of black cherry and with a lot of underlying complexity - unsurprising given its fifteen months in oak.
I'm working on finding a reliable source of good Georgian wine - watch this space - I promise to share!
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