Kakheti Qvevri Winemaking

How to Complete

6 steps curated by Wine Memories

1. 📜 1

   Touch the Vessel That Holds 8,000 Years

   history Free

   Sighnaghi's city walls give you the first orientation: the valley below you is where wine was born.

   📍 WHERE: Walk to the northern section of Sighnaghi's 5km city walls — the only stretch you can actually walk along. The 23 towers are visible from the main square on Rustaveli Street; the accessible wall section is signposted from there. Entry is free.

   💡 WHAT: Look out over the Alazani Valley. Somewhere in the fields about 160km south of where you're standing, archaeologists dug up clay pottery shards at two Neolithic sites — Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora — and found tartaric acid residue inside them. Carbon-dated to 6000–5800 BC. The world's oldest wine. University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Patrick McGovern confirmed it in 2017 in PNAS. What you're looking at isn't just a pretty valley. It's the exact landscape where humans first domesticated the wild Eurasian grapevine specifically to make wine — 1,000 years before anyone else.

   🎯 HOW: Come at golden hour. The Alazani Valley lights up amber against the Caucasus range. The color is not accidental — the same grapes that ferment into amber wine here have been growing in this light for eighty centuries. Let the scale hit you before you rush to the wineries.

   🔄 BACKUP: If the walls are closed or being restored, the viewpoint behind the Bodbe Monastery (2km from Sighnaghi, free entry) gives an equivalent panorama of the valley with the added drama of being where St. Nino, the 4th-century apostle of Georgia, was buried.

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2. 📜 2

   Watch a Master Build Tomorrow's Wine Vessel by Hand

   history $

   Remi Kbilashvili has made qvevri for 40+ years — learned from his father, taught his son Zaza. This workshop 3km from Telavi is where the vessels that will hold the next harvest are being built right now.

   📍 WHERE: Kbilashvili Winery and Qvevri Workshop, village of Vardisubani, ~3km from Telavi town center. Pre-booking is mandatory — no walk-ins. Book via advantour.com or contact through local tour operators. Cost: 25 GEL per person (~$9 USD), includes the workshop tour and a wine tasting at the end.

   💡 WHAT: You will watch Remi or Zaza Kbilashvili build a qvevri using a method unchanged since the Neolithic. They start with two types of local red clay blended with water. Then they roll long ropes of clay and stack them as coils, building the vessel 15–20cm at a time — then stop and wait 24 hours for each layer to harden before adding the next. A single 2,000-litre qvevri takes three months to build. The published first-hand account of the firing — five to six days at 900°C, burning through two truckloads of logs — comes from Sergo Bozhadze's workshop at Shrosha in Imereti rather than from Vardisubani; ask the Kbilashvilis how their own kiln compares. While the vessel is still warm from the kiln, a slab of beeswax is thrown in and the vessel is rolled to coat the interior — the beeswax clogs the clay pores just enough to be hygienic without sealing them completely. The vessel is encased in lime on the outside, and after each emptying it is washed, sterilised with lime and re-coated with beeswax.

   🎯 HOW: Ask Remi how many qvevri he makes per year. The answer — roughly four large vessels — makes the vessel you might drink from somewhere in Kakheti feel completely different. Ask to touch the unfinished clay. The weight and warmth of it is the point.

   🔄 BACKUP: If the Kbilashvili workshop is fully booked, the Twins Wine House in Napareuli (25km from Telavi) houses the world's first dedicated qvevri museum — 5 exhibition spaces, an 8-meter qvevri monument, and a cellar the winery says currently uses 107 qvevris, each of 4 tonnes capacity. Museum entry: 30 GEL adults, 10 GEL students, 5 GEL school students. Open 09:00–21:00 daily.

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3. 🍷 3

   Taste the Grape That Stains Glass Permanently

   wine $

   Pheasant's Tears in Sighnaghi pours wines made from grape varieties most winemakers have never heard of. This is where an American painter moved to a village and accidentally became the most important natural wine producer in the Caucasus.

   📍 WHERE: Pheasant's Tears Winery and Restaurant, 18 Baratashvili Street, Sighnaghi 4200. In the center of the walled town, five minutes on foot from the city wall viewpoint. No reservation required for the wine bar; book ahead for full tasting flights. Approximate cost: 30–40 GEL per person (~$11–15 USD) for dinner with wines.

   💡 WHAT: In 1995, John Wurdeman — an American art student — heard a CD of Georgian folk polyphony at age 15, eventually moved to Moscow to study painting, visited Georgia, and within weeks had bought a house in Sighnaghi overlooking the Alazani Valley. He met Gela Patalishvili, whose family had been making wine for eight generations. Together they opened Pheasant's Tears in 2007. The 117 figure belongs to the estate's Poliphonia field blend — 117 recognised indigenous Georgian varieties, with 40 more still being researched. No reachable source records a ministry grant of vines. The name comes from a Georgian folk saying: only a truly superlative wine can make a pheasant weep tears of joy.

   🎯 HOW: Order the Saperavi. It is a teinturier grape — meaning both the skin AND the flesh are red, not just the skin like in Cabernet Sauvignon or Pinot Noir. Almost every other red wine in the world is made from white-fleshed grapes with colored skins. Saperavi is so pigmented it will stain the glass. Watch the wine move. Ask the server to pour it next to a white wine — the contrast is the education. The name means 'to dye' or 'to paint.' John Wurdeman is an artist. The choice to make wine from this grape was not accidental.

   🔄 BACKUP: If Pheasant's Tears is fully booked, Twins Wine House restaurant in Napareuli offers a comparable tasting experience in a working cellar with 135 qvevris; wine tasting tour costs 17 GEL and includes 6–10 pours.

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4. 🍷 4

   Drink Amber Wine the Way Romans Never Could

   wine $$

   Kakheti-style amber wine — white grape fermented for months with its skins, stems and seeds in a buried clay vessel — predates every wine style the modern world considers sophisticated by several thousand years.

   📍 WHERE: Twins Wine House, village of Napareuli, 25km from Telavi. Open 09:00–22:00 daily. Wine tasting tour: 17 GEL per person, includes 6–10 wines across Rkatsiteli and Saperavi styles. The cellar tour is included — you will walk among 135 buried qvevris.

   💡 WHAT: When the Rkatsiteli arrives, it will be amber — not golden, not pale yellow, but a deep burnished amber the color of old honey. This is what happens when you ferment a white grape with its skins, seeds and stems intact for up to six months inside a buried clay vessel. During active fermentation the winemaker punches the cap down daily with a long pole. Then the vessel is sealed with a wax plug and buried. The wine ages on its lees in the cool earth. What you are tasting is a white grape with the structure of a red wine — tannins from the skins, bitterness from the seeds, the whole biochemical complexity that comes from months of contact with every part of the grape. Modern natural wine drinkers call this 'orange wine' and act like it was invented in Slovenia in 2001. It was invented here. The name 'amber wine' is the Georgian term and it is older than recorded history.

   🎯 HOW: Ask your guide at Twins to show you the museum's exhibit on the qvevri opening ceremony — the spring ritual where vessels sealed in October are cracked open. Ask what it smells like when a fresh qvevri of Rkatsiteli is first opened after six months underground. If the timing is right (April–May), you may get the answer as a demonstration rather than a story.

   🔄 BACKUP: Any family marani (wine cellar) in Kakheti will have Rkatsiteli in qvevri style. If the Twins tour is fully booked, ask your accommodation to connect you with a local family cellar — Georgian hospitality makes this almost always possible.

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5. 📜 5

   Decode the Soviet Extinction Event in a Glass

   history $$

   Georgia is home to over 500 indigenous grape varieties, and Soviet planning narrowed what was actually planted to a handful of them. Pheasant's Tears is bringing back as many as possible — one variety per qvevri.

   📍 WHERE: Back at Pheasant's Tears, 18 Baratashvili Street, Sighnaghi. Request the tasting flight specifically featuring lesser-known indigenous varieties — not just Saperavi and Rkatsiteli. The wine bar staff can guide this.

   💡 WHAT: Georgia is home to over 500 indigenous grape varieties — the most biodiverse wine country on Earth by any measure. The Soviet collective farm system dismantled small-scale production and mandated quantity. Most of those varieties were abandoned. By the time Georgia regained independence in 1991, roughly 525 survived. The Georgian government gave John Wurdeman and Gela Patalishvili 117 of those survivors to plant, study, and vinify. They're still researching 40 more. Every wine in this flight that doesn't say Saperavi or Rkatsiteli on the label is a variety that almost disappeared. Some of them have no name in any wine reference guide written in English. A few have only one or two producers in the entire world.

   🎯 HOW: Ask the pourer which of the wines on the table is the rarest variety. Ask how many bottles of that wine exist in total. The answer will recalibrate what 'rare wine' means. For comparison, a first-growth Bordeaux produces hundreds of thousands of bottles per year. Some of these Georgian varieties produce a few hundred. This is what extinction tastes like when it's being reversed.

   🔄 BACKUP: The Tbilisi Wine Museum (city center, 15 GEL admission including guide) has exhibits on Georgia's ampelographic history with the oldest qvevri on display — carbon-dated at 8,000+ years — and the world's oldest wine grape pips. It is the intellectual context for everything you've tasted. If you're traveling through Tbilisi, go here either before or after the Kakheti trip.

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6. ⛰️ 6

   End the Day at a Georgian Supra Before the Qvevri Is Sealed Again

   Optional

   adventure $$

   A Georgian supra isn't dinner. It is a choreographed ritual of hospitality where food, wine, poetry, and memory are bound into a shared experience led by a tamada — a toastmaster whose job is to make you cry at the right moment.

   📍 WHERE: Pheasant's Tears restaurant, 18 Baratashvili Street, Sighnaghi — or ask your accommodation host to arrange a family supra. The most authentic experiences happen in private homes, not restaurants. A family supra in a working marani will often include wine drawn directly from the qvevri with a long ladle.

   💡 WHAT: The tamada speaks first — a toast to God, then to peace, then to Georgia, then to the ancestors, then to the guests, then to love. You will be invited to add your own toast. Take the invitation seriously. Georgia's entire winemaking tradition is built on the idea that wine is not a product — it is a sacrament connecting the living to the dead to the unborn. The qvevri you drank from today was built by hand over three months, fired for six days, and sealed with beeswax while still warm. The wine inside it fermented in the dark earth of Kakheti for six months. The tamada's toast is the final step in a process that started 8,000 years ago.

   🎯 HOW: Drink slowly. Georgian wine culture does not rush. The supra can last hours. The correct response to a toast is to drain your cup — clay or glass — and turn it upside down to show it is empty. If you cannot drain it, touch the rim to your lips and lower it respectfully. No one will judge you. Georgian hospitality is not a performance. It is the actual point.

   🔄 BACKUP: If a formal supra isn't available, the Rtveli harvest festival (September–October) transforms every village in Kakheti into an open table. Doors genuinely are open, strangers are handed cups, and the smell of fermenting Saperavi hangs over the entire valley. There is no ticketed experience for this — it is simply what happens in Kakheti in autumn.

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