What is qvevri wine? Georgia and the world’s oldest winemaking tradition.

The cradle of wine

Georgia sits between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. Excavations at Neolithic villages south of Tbilisi have revealed pottery with residues of grape wine dating back to around 6000 BC, among the oldest evidence of winemaking anywhere in the world.

Wine runs through Georgian culture: in religion, in art, and at the supra, the traditional feast where a toastmaster, the tamada, leads the table through toast after toast.

What is a qvevri?

A qvevri (also written kvevri) is a large, egg-shaped clay vessel, often lined with beeswax and buried up to its neck in the ground. The earth keeps the temperature cool and stable, so the wine can ferment and age without any modern equipment. Some qvevri hold a few hundred liters, others several thousand.

Making a qvevri is a craft passed down through families of potters. The tradition is so important that UNESCO added the ancient Georgian qvevri winemaking method to its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2013.

How qvevri wine is made

The grapes are crushed and poured into the qvevri together with their juice, skins, seeds and sometimes stems. The wine ferments with its natural yeasts, the vessel is sealed, and the wine stays in contact with the skins for months, often until spring. The solids slowly sink to the narrow bottom of the egg, and the clear wine is drawn off from above.

This long skin contact is what gives Georgian white wines their color and character.

Amber wine

White grapes made this way become amber wine, often called orange wine elsewhere. Thanks to the skins, these wines are deep gold to amber in color, with flavors of dried apricot, tea, walnut and orange peel, and a grip of tannin that you normally only find in red wine. That structure makes them excellent food wines, even with spicy and Asian dishes.

Georgia has hundreds of native grape varieties. Rkatsiteli, Mtsvane, Kisi and Khikhvi are classic for amber wines, and Saperavi, a deeply colored red grape, makes powerful red wines.

A nation reborn

In the Soviet era, Georgian wine was made on a massive scale for the Soviet market, and much of the traditional craft nearly disappeared. Since independence, a new generation of families and small producers has revived qvevri winemaking, and their wines are now poured in top restaurants around the world.

In The Wild Side of Wine, Peter Richards MW travels to Georgia in search of the earliest evidence of winemaking, and finds a nation reborn: a ghostly cave city, thunderstorms, a 400-year-old vine, a Neolithic picnic and a feast of wine, food and song. Watch the first episode free.