The place#
Kartli is the middle of Georgia, the long basin of the Mtkvari river with Tbilisi at its eastern end, and it is the wine region most visitors drive through without noticing. Kakheti gets the coaches. Kartli gets those who know that thirty kilometres north-west of the capital, in a village called Chardakhi, one grower has spent more than twenty years bottling a single white grape.
The region divides into three. Shida Kartli, Inner Kartli, lies around Gori and Kaspi, with the Ateni gorge running south from Gori into the hills. Kvemo Kartli, Lower Kartli, is south of Tbilisi around Bolnisi and Marneuli. And the Mtskheta municipality, north-west of the city, holds the two villages that matter most to me: Chardakhi on the slope above the river, and the Mukhrani plain beyond it, flat, open and windy, with a white palace at its centre.
Two footnotes to history belong here rather than in Kakheti. Pottery from Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, fifty kilometres south of Tbilisi in Kvemo Kartli, carried tartaric acid residues dated to around 6000 BC, the oldest chemical evidence of grape wine anywhere. And in 1878 Prince Ivane Mukhranbatoni, trained in Bordeaux and Champagne, made the first vintage at Mukhrani, the start of a European-method tradition in Georgia that ran alongside the qvevri villages and never replaced them. Both strands are alive within fifteen minutes’ drive of each other.
Terroir: wind, cool nights and stony ground#
Kartli’s vineyards sit between 450 and 700 metres; the Ateni gorge runs from 580 to 750. The climate is continental: hot, dry summers, more wind than Kakheti, cool nights from early September. That swing keeps acidity in Kartli whites where Kakhetian whites turn broad, and it is the root of the region’s long habit of sparkling wine.
The soils are mixed: meadow-cinnamonic loams and humus-carbonate soils on the plain, limestone and marl in the gorge, stony alluvium along the Mtkvari and its tributaries. Chardakhi sits at about 600 metres on the slopes above the river; Mukhrani at about 550 on the plain. Harvest is late by Georgian standards: Chinuri is picked into October, weeks after the Rkatsiteli has come in further east.
Chinuri, Goruli Mtsvane, Tavkveri and Shavkapito#
Chinuri is the grape of Kartli. Late ripening, high in acid, pale in the glass, it makes two different wines depending on what happens to the skins. Fermented off the skins in qvevri it is fresh and saline: green apple, citrus, white flowers. Given six months on skins in the Kakhetian manner it turns amber, with dried apricot, honey and a light grip of tannin. The same vineyard, the same vessel, two wines. I explain the method in orange wine and skin contact and the vessel in qvevri, karas and amphora.
Goruli Mtsvane, “the green one from Gori”, is Chinuri’s usual partner: crisp, herbal, stone fruit, a little more weight. The two share the Atenuri PDO in the Ateni gorge, the one Georgian appellation built around sparkling and lightly sparkling wine. Soviet Georgia’s sparkling industry was based in Kartli for the same reason, acidity that survives a hot August.
The reds are lighter than Kakheti’s. Tavkveri gives medium-bodied, red-fruited wines and a rosé worth the detour; it also turns up as pet-nat in the natural cellars, which I cover in pet-nat explained. Shavkapito, “black cane”, is fuller, sour cherry and pepper, a rarity until a few growers replanted it. Saperavi grows here too, mostly at Mukhrani beside Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Sauvignon; I keep a separate note on Saperavi and Rkatsiteli. Bolnisi, in Kvemo Kartli, is the region’s second PDO, for Tavkveri and Saperavi among others.
Producers to know#
Iago Bitarishvili in Chardakhi is the reason I first drove to Kartli. A third-generation grower, he has bottled under his own name since 2003 and farms two hectares of Chinuri, nothing else, on vines more than sixty years old. In 2005 the vineyard received the first organic certificate in Georgia. Everything ferments spontaneously in qvevri, with no additives: a Chinuri without skins and a Chinuri with six months on them, about ten thousand bottles a year between the two. He was a driving force behind Tbilisi’s New Wine Festival, and in the same village his wife Marina Kurtanidze co-founded Mandili in 2012 with Tea Melanashvili, the first woman-led wine company in Georgia, and makes Marina’s Wine, a Mtsvane in qvevri.
Château Mukhrani, fifteen minutes away, is the opposite pole, and I would not visit one without the other. The Bagration-Mukhraneli held the estate from the 16th century; the palace, designed in 1873 and finished in 1885, and the first vintage of 1878 came from Prince Ivane. Nationalised under the Soviets, it was derelict by the 1990s. From 2001 a new team took a long lease, replanted 102 hectares and built a winery; since 2014 the winemaker and chief executive has been Patrick Honnef, who came from ten years at Château d’Aiguilhe in Bordeaux. The winemaking is classic: steel, French oak, Kartli grapes handled the Bordeaux way. Mukhrani is the largest grower of Shavkapito in the country; the Goruli Mtsvane and the Tavkveri rosé are the wines I pour first, the Réserve Royale Saperavi last.
Pheasant’s Tears, better known for Kakheti, also farms a parcel at Mukhrani, and Chinuri, Tavkveri, Shavkapito and Goruli Mtsvane appear in its range. A few small natural cellars in the villages south of Tbilisi complete the picture.
What a day here looks like on tour#
Kartli is a day from Tbilisi, and I like it as the first wine day in Georgia because the scale is right. We leave at 09:00 and stop in Mtskheta, the old capital, for Svetitskhoveli cathedral and, if the morning is clear, Jvari church above the meeting of the two rivers. By 11:00 we are in Chardakhi.
Iago’s cellar is a family marani, not a tasting room. We stand over the qvevri mouths in the floor, taste the two Chinuris side by side, and talk about why one grape can be enough. Lunch is at the house: khinkali, pkhali, shkmeruli, cheese and bread, the wine drawn from the jar. In autumn the yard smells of pressed skins.
The afternoon is Mukhrani. The palace and park take an hour; the cellar and a tasting of five or six wines take another. I pour the Shavkapito after the morning’s Chinuri and ask the group which is the real Georgia. The answer is both; I give my own view in what I pour, natural and conventional. We are back in Tbilisi by 18:00 with the evening free.
On a longer stay I swap the palace for Gori and the Ateni gorge: the 7th-century church of Ateni Sioni, vines on pergolas in the village gardens, and a sparkling Chinuri from the Atenuri zone drunk where it was made.
Practical#
Tbilisi is the base for any wine tour of Georgia that includes Kartli. Chardakhi is about 30 kilometres north-west, forty minutes by the Mtskheta road; Mukhrani is forty-five minutes; Gori and the Ateni gorge are an hour and a quarter west along the highway. Tbilisi has non-stop flights from Vienna in about 3 h 45 min; from Prague, connect in Vienna or fly to Kutaisi and drive about three and a half hours east.
The best months are May to June, when the plain is green and the nights still cool, and mid-September to mid-October, when Chinuri comes in last of the Georgian whites and the maranis are open. July and August are hot on the plain.
Kartli is the first Georgian wine day of my two-cradles route from Yerevan to Tbilisi, and a day from the capital on the Kakheti qvevri tour before we drive east to Kakheti. On a private tour it stretches to two days.
