Mukhrani is 45 minutes north-west of Tbilisi, and the road there is the road every visitor to Georgia takes at least once: out past Mtskheta, where the Aragvi meets the Mtkvari under the Jvari church, then onto a flat plain at 550 metres that the guidebooks skip. This is Kartli, the old heart of the country, a broad, windy shelf of stony ground with the Caucasus foothills blue to the north. In early October the poplars along the irrigation ditches had turned yellow and the vine rows were half picked.
Then the palace appears, and it is not what you expect of Georgia. White walls, a square tower, tall French windows, a park of old trees with a straight avenue down the middle. I have brought groups here for years and I still watch their faces at the gate. Somebody always says it looks like the Loire. Somebody is right.
The prince who studied in Bordeaux#
The estate belonged to the Bagration-Mukhraneli princes from the sixteenth century. The wine story starts later, with Prince Ivane Mukhranbatoni, who went to France in the nineteenth century and studied winemaking in Bordeaux and Champagne. The palace was designed in 1873 and finished in 1885, a gardener was brought from Versailles to lay out the park, and the first vintage of the new cellar was made in 1878. Georgia had been making wine for eight thousand years by then; Mukhrani was one of the first places where it was made the French way, in barrels, for the bottle.
The twentieth century was not kind to the place. The estate was nationalised in the Soviet period, and by the 1990s the palace stood derelict and the vineyards were gone. The revival began in 2001, when new investors took on the estate, and from 2002 and 2003 they replanted 102 hectares and built a new winery. The palace itself was restored later and is open to visitors now. I first came in the years when the vines were young, on a half-day from Tbilisi that paired a family qvevri cellar in Chardakhi with this very different answer to the same soil.
Kartli grapes, French oak#
That pairing is why I keep coming. The Kartli plain is continental country: hot dry summers, cool nights, and a wind that blows harder than anything in Kakheti. The wind is a nuisance for the picker and a gift for the wine, because it keeps disease down and acidity up. Kartli was the base of Soviet Georgian sparkling wine for exactly that reason, and its white grapes, Chinuri and Goruli Mtsvane, are built for freshness rather than weight.
Château Mukhrani grows those two, plus Rkatsiteli, and three Kartli reds: Tavkveri, light and made for rosé; Saperavi, the black grape of all Georgia; and Shavkapito, “black cane”, a fuller red that is rare outside this region. Mukhrani is the largest grower of Shavkapito in the country. Beside the local varieties stand Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Muscat and Cabernet Sauvignon, planted in the spirit of the prince who thought Bordeaux had something to teach.
The cellar is classic European. Stainless steel for the fresh whites and the rosé; French oak for the reds and for the two Réserve Royale wines, a Saperavi and a Goruli Mtsvane that spend time in barrel. No qvevri. Sulfur is used the way it is used in Bordeaux, measured and without apology. The winemaker since 2014, Patrick Honnef, came to Mukhrani after ten years as technical director at Château d’Aiguilhe in Bordeaux, which tells you most of what you need to know about the grammar of the place.
I say all this without a sneer, because I pour these wines as gladly as the amber ones from Chardakhi. A qvevri and a barrique are both containers for a decision, and the decision here is clarity: varietal fruit, clean lines, oak as seasoning. If you want the long version of how I weigh the two camps, it is in what I pour, natural and conventional. The short version is that Mukhrani is the best place in Georgia to taste what Kartli grapes do when they are treated like Bordeaux grapes, and the answer is more interesting than either side expects.
Our guide from the winemaking team walked us through the barrel hall at about 14 °C. He tapped a cask and said the one thing that day I wrote down word for word.
“Shavkapito was a grape everyone in Kartli could name and almost nobody planted. We gave it a proper vineyard and a barrel hall, and it turned out to want oak the way Saperavi wants time.”
One glass: Shavkapito#
We tasted at a long table in the old cellar. The Goruli Mtsvane was crisp and herbal, green pear and cut grass, the wine I would take to a plate of pkhali. The Tavkveri rosé was pale and dry. Then the one I had come for.
We finished with the Réserve Royale Saperavi: dark, dense, cedar and blackcurrant, the oak more forward, a wine built for a long table and a longer evening. It is the estate’s flagship for a reason, but the Shavkapito is the wine I talk about in the minibus afterwards.
Lunch at the Royal Cellar#
The estate has its own restaurant, the Royal Cellar, and lunch there is part of the visit. The table filled in the Georgian way, all at once and from the edges in: pkhali of spinach and beetroot bound with walnut, badrijani nigvzit, aubergine rolled around walnut paste, a basket of hot shotis puri, then khinkali and, because it was October, churchkhela hung in strings by the door.
The Goruli Mtsvane did what I expected with the pkhali, cutting through the walnut. The Tavkveri rosé turned out to be the khinkali wine, light enough not to argue with the broth inside the dumpling. And the Shavkapito met the mtsvadi, pork grilled over vine cuttings, as if they had been introduced years ago. On this plain, they had.
Mukhrani on tour#
On my Kakheti and qvevri tour Mukhrani is the Kartli day out of Tbilisi: a qvevri marani in Chardakhi in the morning, lunch there, this cellar in the afternoon, the two side by side so that nobody leaves Georgia thinking the country makes only one kind of wine. The same day opens the Georgian half of my Armenia and Georgia route, after a week of karas in Vayots Dzor.
The visit runs about two and a half hours with the palace, the park and the cellar, longer with lunch. The park walk is flat gravel; the cellar is cool in any month, so a jacket helps. The estate receives groups by arrangement, and I book well ahead for September and October, when half of Tbilisi seems to have the same idea.
I drove back into Tbilisi with a Shavkapito in the boot for a friend who insists that Georgian wine without a qvevri is not Georgian wine. The prince who planted this plain went to Bordeaux and came back with a barrel. Nearly 150 years later the argument is still open, and it tastes very good.
