Our passion for wine has taken us down many roads over the years. About a decade ago we came across an opportunity to present a number of rare library wines from the country of Georgia but the marketing and promotional logistics became too difficult to manage in a timely way so it didn’t happen. We recently came across the opportunity to broach the subject once again.
The history is fascinating. According to the website Georgia wine, Georgia is the birthplace of viticulture and there are findings that place the art of winemaking here to 6000 B.C., predating both the development of written language (by 3000 years) and the Iron Age (by 5000 years). According to the local research, Georgia supplied wine to the ‘cradle of civilization’ cities Babylon and Ur. Beyond that, any attempt to document the history of wine there is far beyond the scope of this little piece.
Suffice it to say that Georgia’s climate was kind to the grapevine and Georgia’s history located at the crossroads of Asia and Europe left indelible marks on the people and the wine culture. The varietals are largely unfamiliar to us and the winemaking style is unfettered and honest but a bit more rustic. But this is a place definitely worth discovering and we were recently presented with a couple of fine examples brought to us by a purveyor we have known for years that has happily traveled the back roads of the wine world.
Our subjects here are two expressions of the Separavi grape grown and produced by Papari Valley Winery, a family farm that has built their holdings to 9.3 hectares of vineyard (starting from 2 hectares when Ketevan Gurabanidze started in 2004). The winery is located in the Kakheti region and, more specifically, the Akhasheni appellation. The grapes come from the slopes of the Gombori mountain range which looks out at the Caucasus Mountains across the Akhasheni River Valley and has been farmed organically since the beginning. Separavi is a teinturier variety, meaning the grape has both red skin and flesh.
Also, in Georgia, ‘natural wine’ is not some sort of ‘hipster’ trend. It is simply the way things have been and will continue to be done. Winemaking involves indigenous yeast fermentation and development in Qvevri, what they call their terracotta amphorae. It is ‘natural wine’ in every way but also naturally sturdy and devoid of any of the mousy elements and winemaking flaws that all too often appear in many ‘natural’ efforts in the marketplace. The winery itself is on a hillside and all of the movement of the wines is done by gravity flow. They are bottled unfiltered and unfined and the vines are 12-25 years old as the family is converting some plantings made during the Soviet era to biodynamic and replacing others.
The Paperi Valley 3 Qvevri Terraces Qvevri 8 2019 is black as night, powerful, full-throttle, one of the most physically imposing wines we’ve ever sold! It starts with inky, opaque visuals as you would expect from a red-fleshed varietal. Perhaps the closest comparison flavor-wise would be to a Petite Sirah. The core of fruit comes across like mulberry and dark plum with soil, anise, and some garrigue-like wild herb. Big, dark wine packing 15%+ ABV, this is a seriously good, hearty red with surprising balance and plenty of stuffing and soul. Even though all of the ‘words’ are unfamiliar, this could easily fit into most people’s drinking matrix from a stylistic standpoint.
The Papari Valley 3 Qvevri Terraces Qvevri 11 2019 has surprisingly a lot in common with the Prisoner and Prisoner look-alikes out in the marketplace. Since they work with only indigenous yeasts and these are big wines, sometimes they don’t finish fermentation all the way. Since they don’t believe in commercial, high-power yeasts to try and finish the fermentation, they will bottle it with that little bit of residual sugar in such cases. That forward sweetness makes for a softer and plusher mouthfeel and tender roundness very comparable, as we said, with a number of trendy ‘big red’ blends or certain Valpolicellas done ripassa style, yet retain their own unique spin.
These were exciting enough to us to regenerate our interest in putting Georgian wines in front of you. They are definitely worth some attention and give you some new red wine options. The Papari wines are bold, noteworthy efforts.