Kisiskhevi is fifteen minutes from Telavi, the capital of Kakheti in eastern Georgia, and a little higher: the village stands at 620 metres on the same side of the Alazani valley as Telavi, inside the Tsinandali appellation. The vines grow on the reddish, lime-rich clays that give Tsinandali its whites. Across the valley the Greater Caucasus takes the northern cold, and on a clear afternoon in early October you can count the snowfields.
I arrived at 16:30 on the first Thursday of October, straight from Alaverdi, with the Saperavi harvest still going in the rows beside the road. Schuchmann Wines sits among its own vines, a winery with a hotel attached, or a hotel with a winery attached, depending on which door you use. I used the winery door. Giorgi Dakishvili, whom everyone calls Gogi, was waiting inside with two glasses already poured, one white and one amber, and did not tell me which was which.
A German industrialist and a Telavi winemaker#
The estate was founded in 2008 by Burkhard Schuchmann, a German who ran Vossloh, the rail-technology company, as chief executive from 1986 to 2005, and who had first seen Georgia as a student. He founded it together with a winemaker rather than around a building, which tells you the order of his priorities.
Gogi Dakishvili was born in Telavi, the third generation of his family to make wine. He trained as an oenologist and was winemaker at Teliani Valley, one of the region’s large classic houses, before this. He had already created a qvevri brand of his own, Vinoterra, and it became the estate’s qvevri line. So the house has had two labels from the start: Schuchmann, made in steel and oak in the European manner, and Vinoterra, fermented on the skins in clay. Same vines, same man, two answers.
The house’s public line is “a blend of ancient and modern know-how”. Marketing language, and also accurate, which is rarer than it should be.
Several dozen hectares in three zones#
The vineyards run to several dozen hectares, the oldest planted in 1986, in three appellation zones: Tsinandali, Napareuli and Kindzmarauli. Saperavi, Rkatsiteli, Mtsvane and Kisi carry the range. There are western Georgian grapes too, Tsolikouri and Aleksandrouli among them, and a few rows of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Chardonnay.
The first hall is the one a visitor from Bordeaux or Barolo would recognise: steel tanks for the whites, a room of oak barrels for the reds, sulfur used the conventional way. The Schuchmann Saperavi Reserve is made here, and the Tsinandali white, Rkatsiteli with Mtsvane, and the Kindzmarauli, Saperavi left naturally semi-sweet from the Kvareli zone. European-method winemaking of the kind Prince Alexander Chavchavadze brought to Kakheti a few minutes down the road, at Tsinandali, when he bottled a Saperavi 1839 in 1841.
The second hall is quieter. Lids set into the floor, each one the mouth of a qvevri buried to the neck. This is where Vinoterra happens. Kisi, Mtsvane, Rkatsiteli and Saperavi go in as crushed grapes with their skins and stay in the clay for months while the earth holds the temperature. Then, and this is the decision that separates Vinoterra from the family maranis further down the valley, the wines go to oak to settle, and they are finished with a conventional sulfur regime. Skin contact, clay, and a cellar that measures everything.
“The qvevri does not know who owns it,” Gogi said, tapping a lid with his shoe. “It knows whether you cleaned it, and whether you were patient. That is all it asks.”
I have heard natural winemakers call the qvevri a philosophy. Gogi treats it as a tool, a very good one, and I do not think either is wrong: same vessel, different everything around it. I have set out that choice at more length in what I pour, natural and conventional.
Two glasses back in the tasting room#
We went back to the two glasses. The white was the Schuchmann Rkatsiteli from steel, pale straw, green apple and quince, the kind of wine that makes a Moravian sommelier feel at home. The amber was Vinoterra Kisi. I had guessed right, which was not difficult. Gogi then poured the range in pairs: two Rkatsitelis, two Saperavis, one from steel and oak, one from qvevri and oak. It is the best tasting lesson I know, and I did not construct it. He did.
The Vinoterra Saperavi was dense and dark, black cherry and earth, with the oak sitting behind the fruit rather than on top of it. Next to the Saperavi Reserve it was the more savoury; the Reserve was the more polished. On a table with mtsvadi I would want both.
Mtsvadi over vine cuttings#
The restaurant at the estate has the vines outside the windows and the Caucasus behind them. The kitchen lit a fire of dry vine cuttings at 19:00, and by 19:30 there was mtsvadi, pork threaded on long skewers and turned over the embers until the fat crackled. Before it: pkhali of spinach and of beetroot bound with walnut, badrijani with walnut paste, a tomato and cucumber salad, hot Imeruli khachapuri, a bowl of tkemali. Toward the end, churchkhela, walnuts on a string dipped in thickened must, made that week because it was harvest.
The Vinoterra Kisi went with the walnut dishes as amber wine has here for centuries. The Saperavi Reserve went with the pork and the tkemali; the sour plum picked up the acidity in the wine. Gogi came up from the cellar at 20:30, ate standing, and asked what I thought of the Saperavi with the plum sauce. We disagreed about the serving temperature and both enjoyed it.
Schuchmann on tour#
On my Kakheti qvevri week we reach Kisiskhevi by 17:00 on the fifth day, after Tsinandali and Alaverdi, and sleep at the estate hotel, Schuchmann Wines Château, Villas & SPA, in the middle of the vines. The tasting runs in pairs, as Gogi poured it for me, and dinner is at the winery restaurant. On the longer Armenia and Georgia route it is the ninth day, and by then the group has seen karas in Armenia and buried qvevri in Kartli and Sighnaghi, so the two halls here land differently: less as a novelty, more as a decision. The estate also takes individual visitors for tastings, cellar tours and overnight stays, and runs harvest programmes; book ahead during rtveli.
I like bringing people here after a family marani rather than before. First the clay under a vine trellis with nothing added; then the same clay in a hall with a laboratory next door. Guests who arrive certain that one of those is the honest way usually leave less certain, which is the state of mind I am trying to produce.
I drove to Telavi the next morning with a bottle of Vinoterra Kisi and one of the steel Rkatsiteli on the seat beside me. Same grapes, same village, two cellars. I still have not decided which one I would keep if I could only keep one, and I have stopped thinking I need to.
