Nakhshirghele is half an hour east of Kutaisi, at 197 metres, in the Terjola municipality of Imereti, the western half of Georgia’s wine country. The road leaves town along the Rioni and turns into lanes lined with hazel and persimmon. It was the last week of October, 19 °C, and it had been raining since dawn, which in Imereti is not weather so much as a condition of the air.
There is no sign. Ramaz Nikoladze’s winery is a garden behind a village house, and the cellar is a patch of that garden under a tree, where the mouths of the buried qvevri sit in the wet grass with their lids on. He came out in boots with a ladle in one hand and lifted the first lid before he had finished saying hello. The Tsolikouri had been picked two days earlier and was fermenting; you could hear it.
A grandparents’ parcel and a bar in Tbilisi#
Ramaz comes from a winemaking family and works the parcel his grandparents planted. He started bottling commercially in 2007, first in the old family cellar and then in the small marani he built himself. It is 1.5 hectares in all: Tsitska, Tsolikouri and a little Dzelshavi, vines between ten and fifty years old, on the heavy, moisture-holding clay that Terjola is known for. He farms organically and follows biodynamic practice, and the whole estate makes about 6,000 bottles a year.
He is also, for a man whose cellar is a tree, remarkably central to Georgian natural wine. He heads Slow Food in Georgia. In 2012 he was among the growers who opened Vino Underground, the natural wine bar in Sololaki, Tbilisi, alongside Soliko Tsaishvili of Our Wine in Kakheti, John Wurdeman of Pheasant’s Tears and a handful of others. He is also named among the founders of the Natural Wine Association, formed in Tbilisi in February 2017. Soliko Tsaishvili was his mentor, and one of his wines carries the name.
That bar is where I met the wine before the man. Someone poured me a Tsitska there years ago without telling me what it was, and I guessed Jura, then Loire, then gave up. It was pale gold, saline, and tasted as if it had been made an hour from the sea. The Black Sea is a couple of hours’ drive west of Nakhshirghele. Close enough, apparently.
Churi in the garden#
In Imereti the vessel is called a churi. It is a qvevri by another name: the same clay, the same egg shape narrowing to a point, but more often buried outdoors in the yard than under a cellar floor. Ramaz’s are under a tree in the garden.
What goes into them is the interesting part. In Kakheti the whole crushed grape goes in, skins, seeds and often stems, and stays for six months; that is how the deep amber wines of the east are made. The classic Imeretian method is gentler: a fifth to a half of the skins, usually without stems, for a few weeks to two months. Ramaz goes further down the same road. He treads or presses gently, separates the juice, then returns only 5 to 20 per cent of the skins, seeds and stems to the fermenting must.
The wine stays four to six months in the churi, then another four to five in steel, with some lots finishing in old oak or glass demijohns. Nothing is fined, nothing is filtered, and no sulfur is added at any stage. That last point matters. Zero added sulfur is a decision that has to be defended every day in the cellar, by cleanliness and by full vessels, and on the road, by whoever carries the bottle. If you want the chemistry set out plainly, I have written up sulfites in wine; the short version is that Ramaz gives himself no margin and has learnt to work without one.
“I liked the skin-contact wines of Kakheti and I wanted to see what would happen with our grapes,” he said, lid in hand. “What happened was that Tsitska did not need all of its skins. A fifth was enough. So I stopped there.”
One glass: Tsitska#
We tasted standing in the grass, from the ladle and then from bottles he brought out of the house, six wines under an umbrella his neighbour held over the two of us. The Tsitska is the one I would use to explain the whole estate.
The Tsitska-Tsolikouri, half and half, is rounder, the Tsolikouri lending pear and weight to the Tsitska’s spine. Solikouri sees a longer maceration and comes out closer to amber, with a firmer tannin; it is named for Soliko Tsaishvili. Dzvelshavi is 70 per cent Dzelshavi with 30 per cent Tsolikouri, a pale, crunchy red that I serve chilled. And there is Motskobili, made from Rkatsiteli, Mtsvane, Kisi and Mtsvivani that Ramaz buys in from Kakheti.
The table under the veranda#
The rain won, so lunch moved to the veranda. There is no tasting room here, only a long table with an oilcloth and a family that cooks the way western Georgia cooks. Imeruli khachapuri, the cheese inside, cut into wedges and steaming. Pkhali of spinach and of beetroot bound with walnut. Badrijani, aubergine rolled around walnut paste with pomegranate seeds on top. A bowl of the fresh, squeaky Imeretian cheese. Lobio, red beans with coriander, in a clay pot. Then trout from the river, grilled and finished with a squeeze of sour plum.
If Kakheti’s table is meat and fire, this one is herbs and walnuts, and it explains the wine. A six-month amber would flatten the pkhali. The Tsitska-Tsolikouri, with its fifth of the skins, sat at exactly the right weight, and I understood the 5 to 20 per cent better with a fork than I had with a notebook.
Nikoladzeebis Marani on tour#
On my western Georgia route through Imereti and Racha we sleep in Kutaisi, see Gelati in the morning before the coaches, and are in Nakhshirghele by 11:00. Ramaz hosts small groups by appointment, and I book weeks ahead. There is nothing to tour except the garden, which is the point: lids come off, the ladle goes round, and the technical questions get answered in the grass. Lunch follows. Allow three hours and bring shoes you do not mind getting wet.
On the Kakheti qvevri tour we never reach Imereti, but I bring a bottle of his Tsitska to the last dinner in Tbilisi and pour it beside a Kakhetian amber. Same country, same clay, same idea; one keeps all the skins for half a year, the other keeps a fifth for a few weeks. Guests who have spent five days in the east taste the difference before I have finished the sentence.
I left at 15:00 with the rain still falling and six bottles wrapped in newspaper on the back seat. Ramaz had gone back to the tree and was lifting lids, listening to the Tsolikouri. It is the smallest cellar I visit anywhere between Brno and the Caucasus, and the one that makes the most sense.
