Georgia

The best guide to wonderful natural wines & amazing food in Georgia, the birthplace of natural wine!

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Georgia, the birthplace of natural wine!

For all wine lovers, Georgia is much more than just a country: it is the birthplace of natural wine, where it all began around 8,000 years ago. The world's oldest traces of winemaking were discovered there, in the hills about 50 kilometers south of Tbilisi, at the Neolithic sites of Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveri Gora.

These discoveries, made by an international team of archaeologists, revealed fragments of pottery impregnated with tartaric acid residues, the chemical marker typical of fermented grapes (Vitis vinifera). In other words: wine. In these terracotta jars, the direct ancestors of the qvevris still used today, researchers found grapevine pollen, seeds, and organic traces of fermentation. These elements attest to the early mastery of the winemaking process in the Caucasus, millennia before the great Mediterranean civilizations.

But Georgia has never been content to be a wine museum: it is the beating heart of wine. In Georgia, wine is not a drink; it is a language, a philosophy. Every house has a qvevri buried in the ground, every meal begins with a supra: a ritual banquet where wine accompanies toasts, songs, and stories. This thousand-year-old tradition is still alive today. Thus, in Georgia, wine has never ceased to be natural. No additives, no selected yeast, only grapes, time, and expertise passed down from generation to generation. While Westerners are rediscovering live wines, Georgians have never stopped making them this way.

The renaissance of Georgian wine in the 21st century.

For much of the 20th century, Georgia's wine heritage was diluted by the USSR's demands for mass production. Qvevris were sealed, indigenous grape varieties abandoned, and natural wines replaced by standardized liquids, calibrated to please Soviet planners rather than human taste buds.
But beneath this industrial blanket, the fire still smoldered: in the remote villages of Kakheti, Imereti, and Racha, certain families continued, quietly, to make wine as their ancestors had done. The qvevris never stopped breathing.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the country found itself drained but free. And luckily, that's when it all started again. The younger generations, heirs to a thousand years of expertise, understood that they held an invaluable cultural and sensory treasure.
In the 2000s, a handful of pioneering winemakers, including Ramaz Nikoladze, John Wurdeman, Gela Patalishvili & Erik Andermo of Pheasant's Tears, along with a few others, revived traditional qvevri winemaking, rejecting all chemical inputs, standardization, and technological illusions. This was not a step backwards: it was a return to their roots, but with a modern awareness of life, soil, and taste.

Finally, the world discovers Georgian wines.

Little by little, the world began to take notice. Curious importers, coming from all over the world, adventurous sommeliers, and a few figures from the natural wine movement (particularly in France and Italy) traveled across the Caucasus to understand this phenomenon. What they discovered blew them away:

Amber wines (often called “ orange wines”) are made from extended maceration on the skins, with a tannic and silky texture.
High-altitude reds with unexpected freshness,
And above all, a philosophy of wine based on patience, trust, and sincerity.

This was no longer folklore: it was a gustatory and ethical revelation. In the early 2010s, the movement exploded. Natural wine bars in Paris, Tokyo, New York, and Copenhagen began serving wines from Kakheti as living relics of a pre-industrial humanity. The wines of Pheasant's Tears, Okro's Wines, Nikoladzeebis Marani, and Iago's Wine became benchmarks, not for their technical perfection, but for their soul.

This renaissance is not just economic or gastronomic!

It is highly philosophical! In a world obsessed with technology, productivity, and performance, Georgia reminds us that wine is first and foremost a relationship between humans and nature, between the earth and memory. In 2013, UNESCO officially listed the Georgian method of qvevri winemaking as intangible cultural heritage, recognizing not only a technique, but a worldview: one where wine is made underground, in silence and time, listening to nature rather than forcing it.

Today, Georgia boasts more than 500 indigenous grape varieties, a world record, with around 30 being vinified using natural methods, including Rkatsiteli, Saperavi, Mtsvane, Kisi, Tsitska, and Otskhanuri Sapere. So many poetic names that reflect the diversity of the Caucasus "terroirs". And beyond wine, it is an entire culture that is being reborn: polyphonic singing, communal meals (supras), radical hospitality, qvevri craftsmanship. All of this is woven into a single fabric: "fidelity to life". Georgian wine in the 21st century is not an archaeological reconstruction: it is a quiet revolution, a lesson to learn for the whole world. Where many seek to “be natural,” Georgia reminds us how not to respect our mother nature.

From Tbilisi to Tokyo: how Georgian wine is inspiring the global natural movement

The wine world is often in search of novelty, but Georgia has offered something much better: a rediscovered memory. And it is this memory, deeply rooted in the land of the Caucasus, that has breathed into wine glasses around the world. In the 2000s and 2010s, European natural winemakers such as Pierre Overnoy, Marcel Lapierre, Josko Gravner, Stanko Radikon, and Jean-François Ganevat sought to restore authenticity to wine, finding in Georgia a mirror, almost a spiritual origin.

When Gravner rediscovers the qvevri.

The turning point is almost legendary: in the early 2000s, Josko Gravner, a visionary winemaker from Friuli, traveled to Georgia. There, he discovered buried clay jars, known as qvevri, which have been in use for eight millennia. Fascinated, he ordered several and had them shipped to Italy to use them for macerating his white wines. This gesture, both humble and radical, sparked a wave of imitations. Radikon, Prinčič, Foradori, and La Stoppa also took an interest. It is not a fad: it is a rediscovery of the original gesture, letting wine be born in the earth, without taming it.

Orange wine: a symbol of freedom!

From there, everything accelerated. Orange wine, long perceived as a curiosity for enthusiasts, became a symbol of resistance to standardization. Winemakers in the Jura, Slovenia, Australia, and Japan were inspired by it, each reproducing the Georgian philosophy in their own way:

Long fermentations without additives,
Porous containers (qvevri, amphorae, jars),
Attentive listening to living yeasts rather than total control.

This international movement, later grouped under the label “natural wine,” finds in Georgia not only a technical model, but also a historical and moral justification: if humanity began making wine without additives, why not return to this vinificating style?

Paris, Brooklyn, Tokyo, Tbilisi: we've come full circle.

Today, in a natural wine bar in Paris, Melbourne, or Seoul, it's not uncommon to find a Georgian bottle nestled between an oxidative Jura and an amber Friuli. Georgian wine is no longer an archaeological curiosity: it's at the heart of the contemporary movement. Wine merchants, sommeliers, and enthusiasts spontaneously associate it with the spirit of natural wine: wine that doesn't cheat, that lives and evolves, sometimes confusing but always sincere and genuine.

As mentioned many times before regarding natural wine, this phenomenon is not just a fad. It marks a reconciliation between the modern world and its agricultural past. What Georgia teaches the rest of the world is that wine does not need technology to be great, but rather time, trust, and attentiveness. And while the pioneers of the natural wine movement in France, Italy, and Japan found their spiritual mentors in Jules Chauvet and Lapierre (who were at the helm of the rebirth of the natural wine movement, they readily acknowledge that the roots of this philosophy run even deeper into the soil of the Caucasus. Georgia is truly the land of Natural wine - period.

The future is ancient!

What is fascinating is that Georgia did not seek to seduce the world: it was the world that came to Georgia. The amphorae that were once thought to be primitive have become symbols of the future of wine. Twenty-first-century winemakers, from Tbilisi to Tokyo, Beaune to Brooklyn, now speak the same language: that of natural fermentation, respect for life, for nature, and a quest for authenticity. In a world saturated with noise, Georgian wine reminds us that sometimes we need to listen to the earth whisper. And, between two amber sips, we realize that this renaissance is not a step backwards: it is a new beginning.