Obcha sits at 324 metres in the Baghdati municipality of Imereti, the western half of Georgia that most wine travellers never reach. From Kutaisi you drive forty minutes south along the Khanistskali river, through Baghdati itself, the town where Mayakovsky was born, and up into a country of maize fields, walnut trees and vines strung on wires between them. It had rained in the night. At 10:00 the yard was still wet and the air was 17 °C, which in late October in Imereti counts as cool.
Baia Abuladze met me at the gate. The churi, as Imeretians call their qvevri, were not under a roof. They were in the ground in the yard, the lids just showing in the grass, a cat asleep on one of them. The last Tsolikouri had come in two days earlier and the crates were stacked upside down against the wall to dry.
Three siblings and a village label#
Baia started Baia’s Wine in 2015, in her early twenties, with a rural business grant and the family vines. Her parents are traditional growers who made wine for the house. What she did differently was bottle it, label it and take it out of the village. In 2019 Forbes put her on its 30 Under 30 list for Europe, a list usually full of app founders. I have never heard her bring it up first.
Her sister Gvantsa studied agronomy, and biodynamic winemaking in the Mosel, and she makes the reds; they carry her own name, Gvantsa’s Wine, from the same cellar. Their brother Giorgi is studying oenology and is a partner in the estate. Three siblings, one yard, two labels. The rare-variety work goes back a little further than the label, to 2013, when they started putting Imeretian grapes that had nearly disappeared back into the ground.
I first drank the Tsitska-Tsolikouri in Tbilisi, at somebody else’s table, and asked to see the bottle. A year later I was standing on the lids.
Three whites, two reds#
The vineyard is a little under three hectares in several parcels, farmed without pesticides or fertilisers. The soils around Obcha are stony loams with a good deal of lime in them, and the climate is humid subtropical: cold wet winters, hot summers, more rain than Kakheti and cooler nights. The whites keep their acidity late, which is why picking here can run to the end of October, weeks after the whites around Telavi are in.
Tsitska is the spine: high acid, green apple, and long a base for sparkling wine in the west. Tsolikouri is the flesh, pear and yellow plum, the west’s most planted white. Krakhuna is fuller and slightly waxy and takes to skin contact well. The reds are Otskhanuri Sapere, very dark and sharply acidic, and Aladasturi, pale and light, closer to a chilled Beaujolais than to anything from Kakheti. The whole estate makes around eight thousand bottles a year.
The churi in the yard#
Every wine here ferments in a churi buried in the ground, on its own yeast. Baia treats each vessel as an individual and speaks of them that way, the one that runs warm, the one she gives the long macerations. I explain the vessel in qvevri, karas and amphora; this yard is where you watch it work.
The skins are the Imeretian argument. In Kakheti the whole mass of skins, seeds and often stems goes into the qvevri with the juice and stays six months. Imereti traditionally returns a fifth to a half of the skins, without stems, for a few weeks. Baia began at the very light end, five to ten percent of the skins, less than the village norm. Over the years some cuvées have gone the other way and now spend about three months on skins. The reds are destemmed, ferment on their skins in the churi, then are drawn off and aged in a clean churi without them. There is a pet-nat as well.
“Every churi has a character,” she said, tapping a lid with her foot. “You do not make one wine in six vessels. You make six wines, and then you decide.”
The estate publishes no sulfur figure. The wines are made and sold as natural, and they taste clean, which for me is what counts.
One glass: Tsitska-Tsolikouri#
We tasted standing in the yard, glasses on an upturned crate, Gvantsa coming and going with a pipette.
The Krakhuna was deeper, apricot and beeswax, a real amber. Gvantsa’s Otskhanuri Sapere was the surprise: nearly black in the glass, black cherry and violet on the nose, then a wine as light and sour as redcurrant. I have rarely seen colour and weight disagree so completely.
The table in Obcha#
The family does dinners for visitors and I take groups to them. The table was in the yard, a metre from the lids. Imeretian food is lighter than Kakhetian, herbs and walnuts rather than meat over coals. There was pkhali of beetroot and of spinach, each bound with walnut; badrijani, aubergine rolled around walnut paste; a plate of fresh Imeretian cheese; mchadi, the flat cornbread of the west, hot from the pan; trout from a stream up the valley; and Imeruli khachapuri, the plain one, cheese inside and nothing on top. Baia’s mother brought the khachapuri out herself and stood there until each of us had taken a piece.
The Tsitska-Tsolikouri went with the cheese and the trout as if that were the whole point of it. The Otskhanuri Sapere went with the pkhali, which I did not expect. Churchkhela, walnuts in thickened must, made that week, closed the meal, and a small glass of chacha closed the evening.
Obcha on tour#
On my western Georgia tour through Imereti and Racha we come to Obcha in the afternoon and stay for dinner; it is forty minutes back to Kutaisi and the driver knows the road. Visits are by appointment, direct or through an agency, so book ahead. Kutaisi has its own airport with seasonal non-stop flights from Prague and Vienna a few times a week, about three and a half hours: the easiest Georgian wine region to reach from Central Europe, and still among the least visited.
If you have done my Kakheti qvevri tour first, Obcha answers a question you will have asked yourself there: what happens to a qvevri wine when you take most of the skins away. It becomes this. On the other side of Kutaisi, at Terjola, Ramaz Nikoladze answers the same question with a different fraction, and I like to do the two cellars on consecutive days.
In 2025 Obcha was added to Georgia’s list of protected appellations. The vines, I suspect, have not been told.
I drove back to Kutaisi in the dark with two bottles on the seat beside me, one with Baia’s name on it and one with her sister’s, and the cat, I assume, back on its lid.
