The wind is the first thing. You leave Tbilisi on the Mtskheta road, follow the Mtkvari, and somewhere past the old capital the air starts to move in a way it never does in the city. Chardakhi sits at 604 metres on the slope above the river, about thirty kilometres north-west of Tbilisi, and by the time I parked at the gate, a little after 10:30 on a morning in early October, my jacket was zipped to the chin. This is Kartli, the middle of Georgia, and the wind here is not a nuisance. It is the reason the wine tastes the way it does.
There were crates in the yard, half full of small gold-green bunches, and a smell of crushed grape I could pick out from the car. Iago Bitarishvili came round the corner of the house wiping his hands and asked whether I wanted to see the vines before the light went flat. I did.
One grape, two hectares, since 2003#
Iago is a third-generation grower. The cellar was in the family before it was his, and the vineyard is the same two hectares they have always farmed: Chinuri, nothing else, on vines that are now more than sixty years old. He began bottling under his own name in 2003, and in 2005 the vineyard received the first organic certificate issued in Georgia. He was also one of the movers behind the New Wine Festival in Tbilisi, the May fair where big houses and one-man maranis pour side by side.
I met the wine before I met the man. A Georgian colleague in Brno poured me the skin-contact Chinuri blind years ago and I guessed Friuli. That mistake is the reason I first drove to Kartli. Ten thousand bottles a year do not travel far, and I wanted to see the two hectares behind them.
Chinuri, with skins and without#
Chinuri is Kartli’s grape. It ripens late, holds its acidity through the hot Kartli summer, and is one of the last Georgian whites to come in, usually into October. The slope at Chardakhi is stony, the nights turn cold from early September, and the wind keeps the bunches dry. Vines this old carry small crops without being asked.
In the cellar Iago does one thing twice. The grapes are picked by hand and go into qvevri, where they ferment on their own yeasts. One lot ferments off the skins, so the juice meets clay and little else, and comes out pale and fresh: green apple, citrus, white flowers. The other lot stays with its skins in the qvevri for about six months, the old Kartli and Kakhetian way, and comes out amber, with dried apricot, honey and a light tannin. Same vineyard, same vintage, same vessel, two wines. It is the clearest demonstration I know that skin contact and clay are separate decisions, and I lean on it every time I try to explain orange wine and skin contact to a group.
Nothing is added, he says, and the sentence is short because the list is short. I did not press him for a sulfur number. The bottles I have opened in Brno over the years have been clean and stable, which is the only lab report I need from a two-hectare cellar.
The marani#
The marani is a low room with the qvevri mouths flush with the floor, each closed with a wooden lid and sealed with clay. Iago lifted one lid and the cool came up out of the ground before the smell did: wet stone, then bread, then the skins. Several of the qvevri are very old; he did not put a number on them, and I did not ask. A jar that has held wine for generations is not something you date for a visitor’s notebook.
He explained the cleaning, the part of qvevri work nobody photographs: the jar scrubbed after each emptying with a brush on a long handle, rinsed until the water runs clear, left open to dry, the beeswax lining touched up where it needs it. A good qvevri asks only that you keep it clean.
“Chinuri does not need me to make it interesting,” he said, setting the lid back. “It needs me to pick it on the right day and then leave it alone.”
One glass: Chinuri with skins 2022#
We tasted standing, from glasses set on the rim of a closed qvevri.
The Chinuri without skins, from the same harvest, was the mirror image: pale straw, green apple, a saline edge, the same acidity with nothing wrapped around it. Guests who arrive sure they dislike orange wine often change their minds here, having just tasted exactly what the skins added: colour, texture and a little grip, not a different grape.
Marina’s table#
The tasting room at Iago’s is the courtyard, and the kitchen belongs to Marina Kurtanidze. She has her own wine work: in 2012 she co-founded Mandili with Tea Melanashvili, the first woman-led wine company in Georgia, and under the Marina’s Wine label she makes a Mtsvane in qvevri, which we opened with the food. She cooks for the groups that come through, and I have watched her hand a guest a round of dough and show them, without a word of shared language, how the pleats of a khinkali go.
Lunch was khinkali, the big Georgian dumplings filled with spiced meat and broth, eaten by hand from the topknot; shkmeruli, chicken fried and finished in garlic and milk, a Racha dish; pkhali of spinach and walnut; fresh cheese; bread from the yard oven. The skin-contact Chinuri stood up to the garlic. The pale one went with the pkhali and the cheese. The Mtsvane went with everything, which I suspect is Marina’s point.
Iago talked about the year’s picking dates and which rows ripen first. Nobody talked about scores.
Chardakhi on tour#
On my Kakheti qvevri tour Chardakhi is the second day, and I put it there on purpose. We leave Tbilisi at 09:00, stop in Mtskheta for Svetitskhoveli cathedral, and are at Iago’s gate by about 11:00. The cellar, the two Chinuris and Marina’s lunch fill the middle of the day; at 15:00 we drive fifteen minutes to Château Mukhrani, the palace with its steel and French oak, so the group has tasted both poles of Georgian wine before it reaches Kakheti. The same day opens the Georgian half of my Armenia and Georgia route.
The western tour through Imereti and Racha ends in Tbilisi, and guests who stay an extra day ask me where to go. The answer is Chardakhi. It is forty minutes away, it sets the Kartli method beside the Imeretian one you have just tasted, and I arrange it as a private day with a driver.
Come with an appetite and in shoes that can take a wet yard. Visits are by appointment and Iago leads them himself, so if he is at the press when you arrive, wait. The wine is being made.
I drove back to Tbilisi with the windows down and the wind coming through the car, and stopped thinking about Friuli.
