Rtveli in Kakheti: Wine Made in Clay
Georgia did not learn winemaking from anyone. The archaeological record puts fermented grape residue in clay vessels here around 6,000 BC, which makes this the oldest continuous wine culture on earth — and it is still, mostly, made in the same clay.
The vessel is called a qvevri: a beeswax-lined clay amphora, egg-shaped, holding anywhere from 300 to 3,000 litres, buried up to its neck in the floor of a cellar. Grapes go in — juice, skins, stems and all — the lid is sealed with clay, and the earth holds the temperature steady while fermentation does its work over five to six months.
The result, for white grapes left on their skins, is amber wine: tannic, dry, tasting of dried apricot and walnut skin and nothing at all like the white wine you know. It is an acquired taste that takes about three glasses to acquire.
Rtveli is a working season, not a festival
The harvest runs from the last week of September into mid-October, earlier for whites, later for the Saperavi reds. In villages like Napareuli, Kvareli and Sighnaghi it takes over everything: schools bend their schedules, courtyards fill with plastic crates, and every household with three rows of vines is suddenly very busy.
Visitors get pulled into this without any arrangement being made. You cut grapes for an hour, badly. Somebody corrects your technique. Then there is a table.
The supra, and how to survive one
A Georgian feast has a structure and the structure has an officer: the tamada, the toastmaster, who decides what is drunk to and in what order. Toasts move through peace, the dead, the living, parents, children, and eventually guests — which will be you, and you will be expected to answer.
Three rules that will serve you well:
- Do not sip during a toast. You drink when the toast finishes, and you drink properly.
- Do not toast with beer. It is a joke toast in Georgia, reserved for enemies. Wine or chacha only.
- Eat continuously. The bread, cheese and pkhali are not appetisers — they are structural, and the table will keep going for four hours.
Nobody counts glasses at a supra. They count whether you stayed.
What to look for in a cellar
Kakheti has two kinds of producer now. The large modern wineries — Kindzmarauli, Teliani Valley — make clean, competent, European-style wine at industrial scale, and they give a good tour. The small family marani make qvevri wine in quantities of a few hundred bottles, sell most of it to neighbours, and are the reason to come.
Grapes worth knowing by name:
- Saperavi — the great red. Dark to the point of opacity, high acid, ages for decades.
- Rkatsiteli — the workhorse white, and the classic amber wine when left on skins.
- Kisi — rarer, floral, the one people fall for and then cannot buy at home.
- Khikhvi — nearly lost in the Soviet period, now back in small quantities.
Booking rtveli
The family cellars that welcome guests during harvest fill four to six weeks ahead — they have limited beds and a great deal of work on. If your dates are anywhere between 20 September and 10 October, tell us early and we will place you with people we actually know.
The Wine Country journey runs as a two- or three-day route from Tbilisi, and in harvest season it turns into something closer to a working holiday. For the wider seasonal picture, see why we push people toward September.
