Two grapes that carry a country#
Georgia counts more than five hundred native grape varieties, and I have poured a few dozen of them on my tours. Two do most of the work. Saperavi is the country’s great red, Rkatsiteli its great white, and between them they fill most of the vineyards of Kakheti, the eastern valley that grows roughly seventy percent of Georgia’s grapes. Understand these two and you can read almost any Georgian wine list.
They are not glamorous names. Both were the workhorses of Soviet planning, both suffered for it, and both are now made with a care they rarely had. This is what I tell guests on the drive from Tbilisi over the Gombori pass, before the first glass.
Saperavi: the grape that dyes#
Saperavi means, roughly, “the one that dyes”, and the name is literal. It is one of the few teinturier grapes: not only the skin but the flesh is pigmented, so the juice runs pink from the press and the finished wine is nearly opaque.
Behind the colour sits a grape of high natural acidity and firm tannin, thick-skinned and late to ripen; in Kakheti it comes off the vine through October, after the whites are in. That combination is why Saperavi does three things few red grapes manage at once: a dry wine that ages for decades, a naturally semi-sweet wine that stays fresh rather than syrupy, and a qvevri wine that survives months on its skins without turning coarse.
The dry style is what I pour most. Expect black cherry and blackberry, a sour-cherry edge, something like black tea in the tannin, and a smoky or liquorice note when there is oak. Alcohol sits around thirteen to fourteen percent; acidity keeps it from feeling heavy. It is a red for meat cooked over vine cuttings, which is not a coincidence.
Saperavi has travelled, to Moldova and Ukraine, to the Finger Lakes of New York, to a few Australian growers, but the Alazani valley remains its centre and grows it the way Burgundy grows Pinot Noir: everywhere.
Rkatsiteli: the red-caned white#
Rkatsiteli means “red cane”, for the reddish tint of its shoots. It is the most planted white grape in Georgia, and in the Soviet decades it was planted across the Union in such quantity that for a time it ranked among the most widely planted white grapes in the world. Hardy in cold winters, productive, late-ripening and high in acid, it was exactly what a planning ministry wanted.
That history has hurt its reputation more than the grape deserves. Made carefully in steel, picked in early to mid September, it gives green apple and quince, a white-pepper edge, a medium body and a spine of acidity that carries food.
Then there is the other Rkatsiteli, the one most people mean when they say “Georgian wine”. In the Kakhetian method the grapes go into the qvevri crushed, with skins, seeds and often stems, and the wine ferments and then sits on all of it over winter, five or six months. It comes out amber, with dried apricot, walnut, black tea and a tannin you feel on the gums. Same grape, same village, a different wine. I have written about how skin contact works; Rkatsiteli is the grape that made the technique famous.
Why Kakheti grows them both#
The Alazani valley runs north-west to south-east between the Greater Caucasus and the Gombori range, with vineyards from about 250 to 800 metres. The floor is alluvial gravel and loam; the slopes carry reddish, iron-rich calcareous clays, with more limestone around Tsinandali. Summers are hot, 30 to 35 degrees in July and August, and the south-east towards Sighnaghi is drier than the north-west towards Telavi and Kvareli.
Saperavi wants that heat and the long season; it needs October to finish. Rkatsiteli takes the same soils and the same heat while keeping its acid, because it ripens late enough to miss the worst of August.
The qvevri belongs to the same logic. Buried to the neck in the marani, it holds a steady temperature through a hot autumn and a cold winter, which is what a long maceration needs. Wine residues in pottery from Gadachrili Gora, south of Tbilisi, go back to around 6000 BC, and UNESCO listed the qvevri method in 2013; Saperavi and Rkatsiteli are the grapes it was refined on.
The appellations: Tsinandali, Mukuzani, Kindzmarauli#
Georgia has about thirty protected designations, roughly twenty of them in Kakheti, and the three you will meet most often are all built on these two grapes.
Tsinandali is a dry white from the villages around Telavi, at least 85 percent Rkatsiteli with up to 15 percent Mtsvane Kakhuri, made in the European manner without skins. The name comes from the estate of Prince Alexander Chavchavadze, who brought European-style bottling to Georgia; the estate’s oenotheque still holds a Saperavi of the 1839 vintage, bottled in 1841. A good Tsinandali is quince, hazelnut and a firm, dry finish.
Mukuzani is dry Saperavi from Gurjaani municipality, traditionally aged in oak for around three years. It was the prestige dry red of the Soviet wine list, and at its best it still deserves the place: dark, structured, the tannin knitted by wood.
Kindzmarauli, from around Kvareli on the left bank of the Alazani, is Saperavi made naturally semi-sweet. Cold autumn cellars once stopped the fermentation with sugar left; today it is chilled. Akhasheni, further down the valley near Gurjaani, is the same idea from another village. These wines have a poor reputation abroad and a good one at home, and the home team is right: with churchkhela at the end of a supra, a well-made Kindzmarauli is exactly what is wanted.
Two grapes, two cellars#
Both camps of Georgian wine use these two grapes. Family maranis of one to five hectares with qvevri and wild yeast, and classic houses with steel tanks and French oak, work the same varieties from the same valley, which makes Kakheti one of the best places I know to taste what a cellar decision does to a grape: hold the grape constant and change everything else.
At Pheasant’s Tears, founded in 2007 by the American painter John Wurdeman and the grower Gela Patalishvili, with a cellar in Tibaani and a restaurant in Sighnaghi, Rkatsiteli and Saperavi ferment in buried qvevri on wild yeast, unfined and unfiltered, with little or no added sulfur. The Rkatsiteli is amber and tannic; the Saperavi is deep but fresh, without oak.
Fifteen minutes from Telavi, at Schuchmann Wines in Kisiskhevi, the winemaker Giorgi Dakishvili makes both grapes twice. Under the Schuchmann label they go through steel and oak in the European style; under the Vinoterra label they ferment on their skins in qvevri and then rest in oak. Two Rkatsitelis and two Saperavis in one tasting room is a lesson I could not construct better myself.
Saperavi is not confined to Kakheti. North-west of Tbilisi in Kartli, Château Mukhrani, whose first vintage was 1878, makes a Réserve Royale Saperavi aged in oak under Patrick Honnef, who came to Mukhrani from a decade in Bordeaux. It is Saperavi read by a Bordeaux hand: polished, cedar over the black fruit, the tannin filed smooth. Set it beside a qvevri Saperavi from Tibaani and you have the whole argument about Georgian wine in two glasses, and no need to win it.
How to taste them#
With Saperavi, look at the colour first, because it tells you nothing, and that is the lesson: every Saperavi is black, so the glass cannot hint at weight or sweetness. Then acid before tannin. From steel it is bright and sour-cherried; a Mukuzani is broader with wood; a qvevri Saperavi has a dusty, tea-like grip and fresher fruit than either. If it is semi-sweet, the acidity should still show under the sugar.
With Rkatsiteli, colour tells you everything. Pale straw means steel and no skins: apple, quince, a clean finish. Deep amber means the Kakhetian method: dried fruit, walnut and tannin, to be drunk like a light red, at cellar temperature rather than cold. Between the two sit paler ambers with a few weeks on skins, often the most useful wines at the table.
Neither grape is aromatic in the way Muscat or Mtsvane is. Their virtues are structure, acidity and the capacity to carry whatever the cellar does to them. That is what makes them pillars rather than ornaments.
At the table#
Kakhetian food is built around these wines. Mtsvadi, pork or beef grilled over vine cuttings, wants dry Saperavi; the smoke and fat meet the acid, and the tannin has something to hold. Amber Rkatsiteli was made for walnut: pkhali, the vegetable and walnut pâtés; badrijani, aubergine rolled around walnut paste; satsivi, poultry in walnut sauce. Khachapuri takes either, though I lean amber. Kindzmarauli closes the meal with churchkhela, walnuts threaded on a string and dipped in thickened must.
On tour#
On my Kakheti qvevri tour we taste Saperavi and Rkatsiteli every day, and the point is never repetition: a family marani where the qvevri is opened in front of us, a large estate’s steel and oak, a Mukuzani and a Kindzmarauli side by side after lunch. On the two cradles route we arrive from Armenia with Areni Noir on the palate and put a Saperavi beside it, two ancient reds from neighbouring mountains that share almost nothing. The country guide to Georgia sets out the regions; Kakheti is where the two pillars stand.
