Oda Family Marani - Keto Ninidze
Keto Ninidze – Literary critic. Author of two books. Wine-maker. Founder of Oda Family Winery.
After graduating from Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University and having earned a Master’s degree in Humanities (in 2006) Keto Ninidze continued her studies at Ilia State University and began to work on her PhD thesis. In 2015, after a ten-year scientific and educational practice in Literary Studies, she took up wine journalism and started writing about wine. In the same 2015 she moved to a small Georgian town Martvili, settled in a century-old house of her husband’s ancestors and founded there a family winery – Oda to start making her experimental wines.
Oda is a small, family-based winery, producing 6000 bottles per year and exporting most of the wines internationally, in 9 countries on 4 continents. Oda was one of the pioneers which started to revive old Megrelian and Western Georgian indigenous grape varieties and introduced Samegrelo as a forgotten wine region to the wine society. With her publications and activities Keto Ninidze always tries to respond to the inequality prevailing in such male-dominated fields of patriarchal society as winemaking and to support women, beginners in wine business. Her book about Georgian women winemakers “A Gently Fermenting Revolution” has been created with the same aim to specify women’s style, perception and “language” in modern Georgian winemaking and wine business.