Georgia: The Cradle of Wine

Georgia is where wine was born, and, just as remarkable, where it never stopped. Archaeologists have found the world’s oldest chemical traces of wine in clay jars south of Tbilisi, dated to about 6000 BC.¹ But the deeper marvel is not the age of the evidence — it is that the same method those Neolithic farmers used is still working in Georgian cellars today. This is not a country that discovered wine and moved on. It is one where an eight-thousand-year-old technology, an entire grammar of grapes, and a way of eating, praying, and toasting all still run on the vine.

Most wine countries can name a founding region or a signature grape. Georgia has more than five hundred grapes of its own and a fermentation vessel protected by UNESCO, and it folded both into a national identity so completely that you cannot really separate Georgian wine from Georgian life. To understand it you have to look past the “oldest wine” headline to what grew up around it.

The world’s oldest wine culture

The story starts at two Neolithic mounds, Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, where jars from around 6000 BC still carry the tartaric-acid signature of fermented grapes.¹ That makes Georgia the oldest confirmed wine culture on earth, a title explored in our piece on the origins of wine. What sets Georgia apart from other ancient wine lands is continuity: the wide-bellied clay jars of those first vintners are the direct ancestors of the qvevri still buried in Georgian cellars, and the technique has passed hand to hand for roughly eight thousand years without a break.²

A qvevri is a large egg-shaped earthenware vessel, lined with beeswax and sunk to its neck in the cool earth of a cellar called a marani. Grapes go in — often juice, skins, stems, and pips together — and the buried vessel holds a steady temperature while fermentation and ageing happen in the same womb of clay. In 2013 UNESCO inscribed the qvevri method on its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage, formally recognising what Georgians had never forgotten.²

Amber wine: the original “orange” wine

Walk into a fashionable natural-wine bar today and you will find “orange wine” on the list, sold as a daring modern experiment. It is nothing of the sort. Orange, or amber, wine is simply white grapes fermented on their skins the way reds are made, and Georgians have been doing exactly that in qvevri for millennia.³ In Kakheti the skins, stems, and pips stay in the jar with the juice for four to six months, drawing out deep amber colour, grippy tannin, and flavours of dried apricot, walnut, and tea — a wine that behaves more like a red than anything in the conventional white aisle.

The revelation for many drinkers is that the hippest wine trend of the last decade is, in Georgia, the oldest way of all. When natural-wine evangelists in London and New York rediscovered skin-contact whites, they were reaching back, knowingly or not, to a Georgian marani. That is the hidden thread of Georgian wine: what looks like the avant-garde is very often the ancient.

A grape for every valley

Georgia’s other astonishment is genetic. The country holds more than 525 indigenous grape varieties, more than any other nation, of which only about three dozen are grown commercially — a living gene bank of the vine.⁴ Two grapes anchor the canon. Saperavi, the flagship red, is one of the rare teinturier varieties whose flesh is red rather than just its skin, which is why its name means roughly “the place of colour” and its wines run almost black. Rkatsiteli, the white, is the most planted grape in the country; its name is thought to mean “red stem,” for the vine’s ruddy shoots.⁴

The supra: wine as a way of life

In Georgia wine is not a beverage you order; it is the spine of a ritual. The supra, the traditional feast, is governed by a tamada, or toastmaster, who steers the table through a long, rising sequence of toasts — to peace, to ancestors, to children, to the dead — each answered with wine. The role is taken seriously; a good tamada is part poet, part master of ceremonies, and the toasts can run for hours. Wine here is the medium of memory and hospitality, not an accessory to the meal.

That sacred dimension runs deep. By tradition, when St. Nino brought Christianity to Georgia in the fourth century she carried a cross made of grapevine wood, bound with her own hair — the grapevine cross that remains a symbol of the Georgian Orthodox Church.⁵ Faith, nation, and vine grew together, and the painter Niko Pirosmani spent his career filling canvases with exactly this world of feasts, wineskins, and the fellowship of the table. To attack or forget Georgian wine, in this framing, is to attack something close to the national soul — which is precisely what makes the next chapter sting.

Stalin’s cellar and the Soviet century

The most powerful Georgian of the twentieth century never lost his taste for home. Joseph Stalin, born Ioseb Jughashvili in the Georgian town of Gori, is widely said to have favoured Khvanchkara, a semi-sweet red from the mountainous Racha region blended from the Aleksandrouli and Mujuretuli grapes.⁶ By many accounts he had it served at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, pouring Georgian wine for Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill as the three men carved up the postwar world. (Devotees of another Georgian semi-sweet, Kindzmarauli, dispute which was truly his favourite — a debate that tells you how much national pride rides on the question.)

Under Soviet rule Georgia became the wine cellar of the entire USSR, and the appetite of that vast market reshaped its vineyards. Demand ran to soft, semi-sweet reds produced in enormous volume, and quantity too often crowded out the patient qvevri craft. The trade brought money and a captive market; it also nudged an eight-thousand-year tradition toward the factory. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Georgia inherited a wine industry built around a single dominant customer — Russia — and that dependence was about to become a weapon.

Embargo, and the return to the qvevri

In 2006 Russia abruptly banned imports of Georgian wine, citing quality concerns that almost no one outside Moscow took at face value; the move landed amid sharp political tension between the two countries and was widely read as economic punishment.⁷ Russia had been taking the great majority of Georgia’s wine exports, and the ban was a body blow. Yet it forced a reckoning. Cut off from its easy market, Georgia had to prove itself to more demanding buyers in Europe, the United States, and East Asia — and the calling card it reached for was the very thing that made it unique.

The result has been a renaissance built on the oldest foundation imaginable. A generation of winemakers returned to the qvevri and to amber wine, and Georgian bottles began appearing on the world’s most serious wine lists as the natural-wine movement caught up with a technique Georgians had used all along.⁸ Russia lifted the embargo in 2013, the same year UNESCO honoured the qvevri method, but by then Georgia had already found a better story to tell — not the cheap sweet red of the Soviet canteen, but the amber wine of the world’s first vintners, poured again from clay.

This day in wine history

Milestones in the world’s oldest wine culture.

• c. 6000 BC
  The world’s oldest wine

  Clay jars at Gadachrili Gora near Tbilisi carry the earliest chemical trace of grape wine anywhere on earth.

• 4th century AD
  The grapevine cross

  By tradition, St. Nino converts Georgia to Christianity carrying a cross of vine wood bound with her hair — wine and faith entwined.

• 1945
  Khvanchkara at Yalta

  Stalin has his favoured Georgian semi-sweet red poured for Roosevelt and Churchill as they plan the postwar world.

• 2006
  Russia bans Georgian wine

  Moscow halts imports in a move widely seen as political, cutting off Georgia’s dominant market overnight.

• 2013
  UNESCO honours the qvevri

  The clay-vessel method is inscribed as Intangible Cultural Heritage the same year Russia lifts its embargo.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• The origins of wine, where winemaking began
• Areni-1, the world’s oldest winery, next door in Armenia
• Wine in ancient Israel, from Canaan to the Byzantines
• Hajji Firuz Tepe, the Iranian jar that once held the record

References

1. P. McGovern et al., “Early Neolithic wine of Georgia in the South Caucasus,” PNAS 114 (2017). pnas.org. ↩
2. UNESCO, “Ancient Georgian traditional Qvevri wine-making method,” Intangible Cultural Heritage (2013). ich.unesco.org. ↩
3. Jancis Robinson, Julia Harding & José Vouillamoz, Wine Grapes (Allen Lane, 2012), Saperavi & Rkatsiteli entries. ↩
4. National Wine Agency of Georgia, indigenous varieties & Kakheti data. wine.gov.ge. ↩
5. Encyclopædia Britannica, “St. Nino” and the Georgian grapevine cross. britannica.com. ↩
6. “Khvanchkara,” wein.plus Wine Lexicon. wein.plus. ↩
7. “Russia bans Georgian and Moldovan wine,” BBC News (2006). bbc.co.uk. ↩
8. Decanter, features on Georgia’s qvevri and amber-wine revival. decanter.com. ↩

Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture
Patrick E. McGovern (Princeton University Press)
The archaeologist behind the Georgian discovery on wine’s deep prehistoric roots.

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