Georgian Wine: What to Drink and How to Order It in Tbilisi

Georgia's claim to be the oldest wine country rests on chemistry: tartaric acid, the fingerprint of grape wine, in clay jars from 2 Neolithic villages about 50 km south of Tbilisi, dated to about 6000 to 5800 BC. The researchers behind the 2017 study in PNAS called it the oldest known wine made from the Eurasian grapevine.

The other half of the story is the qvevri, an egg-shaped clay jar that's filled with crushed grapes, sealed and buried in the ground. UNESCO put the qvevri winemaking method on its intangible heritage list in 2013: the method, not the jar or the wine.

Everything goes into the qvevri: the juice, the skins, the stalks and the pips. That mass of skins and pips is called chacha, and the grape spirit distilled from it took the same name.

Underground, the jar holds a steady 13 to 15 C while the wine ferments. Reds come off their skins after 7 to 10 days, but Kakhetian whites stay on them until spring, according to the National Wine Agency, and that's where amber's colour and grip come from.

Imereti, in the west, uses at most a third of the skins for about 2 months, so its whites carry less tannin. Plenty of Georgian wine is made the European way in steel or oak, and qvevri wine is a minority, so look for the word on the label if the jar is what you're after.

Amber is the style Georgia is known for abroad: white grapes left on their skins for months, which turns the wine gold or the colour of strong tea and gives it a little tannin. The rest of the world says orange wine, but here it's amber wine, and it's usually dry.

Saperavi is the red: red inside as well as out, inky and often opaque, with dark berries, firm tannin and high acid. It's made dry, semi-sweet, sweet and fortified, which explains most of the confusion on a Tbilisi wine list.

Rkatsiteli is Georgia's most planted grape, crisp with citrus and apple from a steel tank and all honey and apricot from a qvevri. Mtsvane, Kisi and Khikhvi are the other whites you'll meet, 3 of more than 500 native grape varieties. For sparkling and European-style wine, the region to know is Kartli.

Don't write off the semi-sweet reds as dessert wine: one reviewer at Lavera, a 24-hour Georgian restaurant, had help choosing the wine and came away calling Khvanchkara a favourite. Kindzmarauli and Akhasheni are semi-sweet Saperavi, and Khvanchkara comes from 2 grapes grown in Racha, Aleksandrouli and Mujuretuli.

Most of the famous names on a Georgian wine list are places, not grapes. The National Wine Agency's register holds more than 30 protected appellations, each with rules on grape, style and sugar, so Mukuzani and Kindzmarauli are both Saperavi, one dry and one semi-sweet.

Drink across the styles instead of 3 glasses of the same thing, and start from what you already like at home. The table does the translating.

The glass is where the mark-up sits. One reviewer at a wine shop's bar paid 20 GEL for a glass of a wine that sold for 30 to 40 GEL a bottle, so if 2 of you want 2 glasses each, buy the bottle.

The cheapest wine in town comes from the tank. The shops that sell draft wine by the litre will send you home with a litre of dry Saperavi for less than a glass costs in a wine bar.

A wine bar in the old town is the easy first night: wine by the glass and staff who'll talk you through it. One reviewer counts around 2,000 wines at 8000 Vintages, plus vending machines offering about 16 wines, paid by card.

For amber, the natural wine bars lean hardest on small producers and qvevri bottles. A guided tasting in an old cellar is the fastest way through the styles, with 4 to 7 wines and a plate of cheese.

Restaurants pour their own wine too: reviewers have mentioned the homemade wine at Chokhi Veraze, one of the city's khinkali houses, 29 times. At a supra, you drink when the tamada makes a toast, not when you're thirsty.

A bottle is the souvenir that survives the trip best, and Tbilisi's wine shops expect you to fly with it. Ask whether a bottle is qvevri or European-style: at Ge-Wine, one reviewer says the staff pointed out which bottles were made the Georgian way and which the European way, then let them taste. Check your own country's customs allowance before you buy a case.