Back in the USSR. How Georgian wine survived the Soviet years.

A rainbow in black and white

Under Soviet rule, agriculture was collectivized and growers had to deliver their grapes to state wine factories. Each republic had its role: Georgia made wine, citrus and tea, and its wines were shipped across the Soviet Union. At the Bagrationi winery, Irakli Cholobargia, who grew up in Soviet times and now works for the Georgian government, describes a single state monopoly controlling everything from vine to wine, with one generic label.

The result was like taking a black-and-white photo of a rainbow. Of some 525 known indigenous grape varieties, only a handful were commercially available. Rkatsiteli for white and Saperavi for red still account for most of the harvest today. Yet around 25 to 30 varieties have already been brought back to life, and the list keeps growing.

Rescuing hundreds of grape varieties

At the National Scientific Research Center for Agriculture in Jighaura, Peter walks rows holding more than 400 Georgian grape varieties. Vines are collected from all over the country, their DNA is analyzed and compared with databases, and the identified varieties are planted out for study and future growers. Peter reads the labels like poetry: Rkatsiteli, Mtsvane Kakhuri, Khikhvi, Kisi and many more.

It is slow, expensive work, but it may prove vital. During the Soviet years, farmers kept a few vines of ancient varieties in their small private plots because to them it was cultural inheritance. Homemade wine was trusted far more than the mass-produced bottled wine of the state.

Lado Uzunashvili and amber wine

In Kakheti, the heartland that produces around three quarters of Georgian wine, Peter visits Lado Uzunashvili, an 11th-generation winemaker. At 11 or 12, Lado's first job was climbing into qvevris to clean them, paid with his first sip of wine. That wine was amber, the Georgian name for what the world calls orange wine: white grapes fermented on their skins, with the freshness of a white and the structure of a red.

Peter is then invited to try a qvevri for size himself. See how a Master of Wine fares inside a vessel two and a half meters deep.

Stalin, sweet wine and freedom

By the roadside in Kakheti, Peter finds a Second World War memorial with a portrait of Joseph Stalin, who was born in Georgia. Stalin, Peter learns, is either the most hated or the most loved person in the country, and he hears a painful family story of a soldier never allowed to return home. Peter also hears how Stalin liked lightly sweet, gently sparkling wines from Chinuri, and a tale about his tactics with glasses when negotiating with Churchill.

Irakli remembers joining his first anti-Soviet rally at 16, in 1988, and his amazement at the freedom he found on his first trip abroad. Today, places like Fabrika, a former Soviet textile factory turned into a lively space for young people and street art, show a new Georgia.

An unbroken tradition

Qvevri winemaking continued through every invasion, from Arabs to Persians to Soviets, kept alive in villages and family cellars. Georgians call wine liquid sunlight, and in this episode you will hear wine described as the fuel for life. Protected by the Greater and Lesser Caucasus, Georgia has a strong claim to be a cradle of cultivated winemaking, with some 8,000 vintages behind it.

Watch to see how Georgia kept its wine identity through 70 years behind the Iron Curtain, and what is now laying the foundations for its wine scene of tomorrow.