Financial Times: “Andrew Jefford on a new era for Georgian wine”

Award-winning wine writer Andrew Jefford has written an article about Georgian wine for the Financial Times, in which he described the current era of Georgian wine and its future development prospects.

What should Georgia’s grand cru (the French term meaning "great growth” or "great site”) wines be? – askes Jefford in the article.

Georgia has lustrous estates of aristocratic origin, such as Château Mukhrani and Tsinandali Estate; quality at both has surged since my last visit to Georgia in 2013, and both now produce elegant, gastronomically subtle wines admirably suited for restaurant fine dining. Outstanding Georgian single-vineyard wines, though, are still rare. Prestige for Georgia tends to attach not to wines of place, but to wines of method— and especially the method of fermenting both red and white wines with their skins, pips and stems in a large clay jar, or qvevri, buried in the earth. After fermentation, white qvevri wines are sealed and left for six months or more, with much smaller additions of sulphur than might be found in conventionally vinified wines. Sounds risky? It is. Therein lies more Georgian controversy”, read the article.

Georgian traditional wine specialities are culturally fascinating, eerily beautiful and globally unique. Conventionally vinified Georgian red and white wines, by contrast, have to compete with every other red and white in the world. They have a distinctively Georgian appeal, thanks to regional differentiation and the country’s well-stocked library of indigenous grape varieties: the whites are fresh, blossomy, subtle and haunting, often light in alcohol by today’s standards; the reds (especially those from Saperavi) dark, urgent and vital. But they struggle to outshine great qvevri wines — such as the 2016 Orgo Rkatsiteli. Light amber in colour, with scents of rain on dry earth and with spotless, lightly grippy yet somehow plush flavours, this perfumed, mouth-filling, savoury-sweet nourishment is one of wine’s universal waymarks,” read the article.

Read the full story here.