Tbilvino

Tbilvino is a Georgian winery in Kakheti, the country's main wine region in the east, and it is one of the older names in the business. 2023 marked its sixtieth year, which puts the founding in 1963. For most of that time it was a Soviet enterprise and a very large one. The brothers who run it now describe its old role as the backbone of the Georgian wine industry and a pillar of the all-Union economy in wine.

George and Zurab Margvelashvili took it on in the 1990s, when, in their own words, the field was "the graveyard of the wine industry" after the Soviet system collapsed. Neither came from a winemaking family. What they have done since is turn a volume operation into a quality one, and the direction of travel is clear enough: since 2002 they have made a Reserve range, initially with Australian consultants, and since 2018 those reds have come from their own fruit rather than bought grapes. Their vineyard at Vachnadziani runs to 128 hectares across seventeen plots, and they now bottle single-plot Saperavi from it.

Georgia matters here, and not just as a curiosity. Wine has been made in this country continuously for something like eight thousand years, which is the longest unbroken tradition anywhere, and the traditional vessel is the qvevri: a large clay amphora buried in the ground, in which the wine ferments and ages on its skins. Tbilvino make qvevri wines, a Kisi and a Saperavi, alongside their modern stainless-steel range.

There are two grapes to know. Saperavi is Georgia's great red. The name means dye, or paint, and it is a teinturier: the flesh of the grape is red as well as the skin, which is genuinely rare and is why the wines come out almost opaque. There is real acidity underneath all that colour and the wines age. Rkatsiteli, the white, means red stem. It is one of the oldest cultivated varieties in existence and it was, extraordinarily, the most widely planted grape in the entire Soviet Union, accounting for around eighteen per cent of Soviet wine production by 1978, before Gorbachev's vine-pull campaign. It is naturally very high in acid, which is why it works both as a crisp modern white and as an amber, skin-fermented qvevri wine.

The entry-level Saperavi and Rkatsiteli are both made in the modern style, in stainless steel. If you have never drunk Georgian wine, a heavily tannic amber qvevri white is a lot to take on as a first bottle, and those two are the honest introduction. The qvevri wines and the single-vineyard Saperavis are where the winery goes from there.

Georgia is one of the few genuinely different things left in wine, and it costs very little to find out whether it is for you.