(CNN) — Six thousand years before Christ turned water into wine, the ancestors of modern-day Georgia were turning grapes into it. It's thanks to these imaginative Stone Age sapiens that today we enjoy Gamay from Beaujolais, Chianti from Tuscany, Rioja from Navarro and Cabernet Sauvignon everywhere from France to New Zealand. 

Varietals from the birthplace of wine, however, have remained largely unknown to Western palates -- until now.

Today, Georgian wine is recovering from nearly 100 years of isolation and destruction by a system that industrialized viniculture and institutionalized the practice of making bad wine. The small country -- about the size of West Virginia -- was the chief provider of wine to the entire USSR.

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Inside the wine cellar of Keto Ninidze, literary critic, journalist, and former choir singer, are just four qvevri (egg-shaped clay casks used for wine fermentation), in the same place her husband’s grandmother made wine. Dresses hang from the wooden beams, including the dress Keto’s mother wore when she was born, establishing the winery as a feminine space.

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One of the world’s oldest winemaking countries, Georgia rests heavily on tradition. It’s customary for men to make wine and for their wives to pour and serve food without even being introduced. But Keto Ninidze has made her mark on the wine industry here, as well as in the greater wine world.

Beyond breaking boundaries by simply producing wine, she brings attention to women and domestic violence through controversial wine labels that feature images of naked women. A former journalist, she co-authored the book A Gently Fermenting Revolution: Women in the Georgian Wine Business and has been a pioneer for wine tourism to Georgia’s Samegrelo region.

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WHEN ILLIA KIKNAVELIDZE MADE WINE in the Republic of Georgia, he had to lower his entire body into human-sized clay pots, called qvevri, that were buried underground. Using the rough bark of a cherry tree, he would scrape the inside of each egg-shaped pot by hand, removing every bit of grape skin and bacteria from the previous batch. Every inch had to be immaculately scrubbed to keep the next round from spoiling. Then, he would fill his qvevri with juice from local grapes, cover it, and let nature do the rest, just like local winemakers had been doing for some 8,000 years.

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In the Republic of Georgia, every meal is a feast. The entire family, from grandmother to grandchildren, will spend days preparing a meal when people are visiting. I learned this firsthand when I recently traveled the country with a small army of natural winemakers, importers, sommeliers, and chefs from the all over Australia, the US, and Europe during a week of intense eating and drinking.

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We used to spend a lot of time in western Georgia’s Samegrelo region when breakaway Abkhazia was our beat. Zugdidi, the regional capital, was our overnight stop coming and going across the river to the disputed land in the north. Our local friends would welcome us with Megrelian hospitality, decorating their tables with hearty and spicy local fare that made us purr. The wine, however, with its sweet barnyard vinegary tang, was a different story.

We assumed that this subtropic-like land, with its year-round lushness and mandarin, hazelnut and overgrown tea fields, was hostile to good wine grapes. We didn’t realize back then that the practice of making sugar-wine was not exclusively a Megrelian thing, but a Communist legacy practiced throughout the country. In fact, the Soviets had a wine factory in Samegrelo that cranked out lousy semi-sweet wine from otherwise divine local grapes. There was a lot we didn’t know.

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People warn against buying a bottle of wine based on its looks, but some beautiful labels were designed to tell a story—not just show off. The juice behind the art is definitely the most important part, but aside from providing essential information about a wine, unique labels can have more of a story behind them than you think. Here, we round up a list of eye-catching labels (on bottles containing wine good enough to back them up) and reveal the stories behind the stickers.

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WHEN WE SAY that Georgia may be the most underrated food and drink destination in the world, we’re not talking about peaches and sweet tea. At the intersection of Europe and Asia lies Georgia — the country — one of the most culturally rich, diverse nations in all of Eastern Europe.

Although it’s small in size, Georgia has a rich and extensive history, with layers of occupation, war, and fights for independence woven in between. After hundreds of years of Russian occupation, the former Soviet republic finally declared its independence in 1991, electing its first president on May 26 that same year. Beyond its modern history, Georgia is rich in antiquity, much of which is still readily available for travelers to see. Traditional song, stunning architecture, and outdoor adventures in the Caucasus Mountains and Black Sea abound, but the real draw for travelers in-the-know today is the food and drink.

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For many wine lovers, Georgia is the ultimate bucket-list destination. Known as the ‘Cradle of Wine,’ the country’s rich history (over 8,000 vintages produced) has deemed it as the birthplace of fermented grape juice. Last month, I found myself seated at a café in Paris, when I unexpectedly received an invitation that I couldn’t refuse. The planned voyage was five days in eastern Europe’s winemaking mecca with three other wine professionals, travelling across the country to taste, see, and experience. Although I knew I’d be exhausted post-harvesting in Burgundy, this was an offer I couldn’t pass up. I last-minute accepted, and two weeks ago from yesterday, found myself on a flight to Tbilisi, the country’s bustling capital city.

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As another stop on our tour of South and West Georgia, we visited Oda, the family home of Keto Ninidze. Beneath the living-quarters of the house is the family winery managed by Keto, and there is also a restaurant business there. The restaurant is where we had lunch, except we were the only guests at the time, and Keto stayed with us at the table after showing us around her cellar and vineyards. So where does Vino Martville come into the picture? Well, Keto is married to Zaza Gagua who is a partner in that winery. (It is sometimes styled as M’artville with the “art” bit in another font and/or colour, I shall stick with Martville!) Vino Martville is currently better established than Oda Family Winery, so you are more likely to have heard of it, and the wines drank with lunch were Vino Martville.

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I had been wanting to try wines from Oda Family Marani for some time, so when I heard that Sager and Wine had imported some into the UK,  I approached them in August 2022 to get some, and finished up buying a mixed case of interesting artisanal wines from Georgia.

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I went to Georgia primarily to experience amber wines made in traditional Georgian qvevri (sometimes spelt kvevri and both pronounced /kwevri/). These are handmade, fired clay pots of anything between about 150 and over 2,000 litres which are buried up to their necks in the ground, usually in a roofed winery building, however humble, but sometimes outside under an open sided roof, or simply under the stars. My interest was – is – in amber wines (sometimes called orange wines but in Georgia referred to as amber; personally I prefer the term amber too), which are wines made from white grapes but vinified in the same way as red wines; by fermenting the grapes on their skins and then keeping the wine on the skins for up to 6 months after fermentation has completed. Production is generally from organic worked vineyards although generally not certified, but without use of pesticides and herbicides, and in the winery wild yeasts, no inoculation for either alcoholic or malolactic fermentation and no (or very little use of) sulfur. The resulting wines have lots of tannic structure and autumnal fruit and spice flavour profiles, with honey and nuts.

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All these women winemakers from Georgia were also pouring their wines at Brumaire and if my carelessness in managing my time made that I missed them there, at least i could correct this misstep the following day thanks to a private tasting organized by Alex in his Vineyard Gate wine shop in Milbrae in South San Francisco. The wine shop which was closed that day (monday) is just a couple of minutes on foot from the BART station. The man who helped these winemakers attend was there too, Chris Terrell, he is the importer at New York-based Terrell Wines. Like the linked article implies, if you had a Georgian wine in New York, there's a good chance it came in through Chris Terrell who imports 22 family wineries from Georgia. I learnt something interesting also in this linked article, Chris first discovered Georgia by cycling through the country in 2004, this was before he was dealing with wine; we have something in common (I also cycled through eastern and western Europe and the U.S.).

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2019 was a good year for prying ourselves out of our Tbilisi comfort zone, filling the tank and getting out of town. For us it is a way to connect to the captivating earthy genuineness that prompted us to move here, but this year we wanted to meet some of the people who have become part of what we call a “return to the village” trend.

On one trip to Kakheti last winter, we visited Sopo Gorgadze and Levan (Leo) Tsaguria, a Tbilisi couple who left the city to resume new lives as farmers in the village of Shalauri. Kicking back in their living room looking at the Caucasus Mountains stretching across the Alazani Valley, we learned how they became cheesemakers more by coincidence than by design. Then Sopo set down a board with artisan goat and cow’s milk cheese that straightened us right up. Nobody in Georgia makes cheese this delectable. MarletaCheese, which is named after their first cow, can be found in several Tbilisi restaurants, wine bars and specialty shops. Sopo also teaches cooking and hosts private dinners, which feature her award-winning cooking, by appointment at their home, providing a refreshing touch of sophistication to Kakheti’s developing food scene. “We are starting a new cheese tradition in Georgia,” Sopo said.

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Georgien gilt als die Wiege des Weinbaus. Nun bringt eine junge Generation von Winzerinnen die jahrtausendealte Kultur zu neuer Blüte – und wehrt sich clever gegen das Patriarchat und russische Dominanz.

Eine nackte Frau rekelt sich an einer Weinrebe. Sie strahlt dem Betrachter entgegen und verkündet eine eindeutige Botschaft: Hier bestimme ich. Ihre Nachbarin hat es weniger gut getroffen. Sie steckt, ebenfalls entblößt, in einem viel zu engen Glas fest.

Als allegorische Darstellungen zieren die beiden Frauen die Etiketten eines georgischen Roséweins, der sich Naked Ojaleshi nennt. Die eingezwängte Figur steht für die traditionelle Weinkultur des Landes, in der Frauen keinen Platz haben. Die andere symbolisiert eine neue Welt, die von selbstbewussten Frauen geprägt wird. „Ich wollte von Beginn an eine klare Botschaft vermitteln“, sagt die Winzerin Keto Ninidze, die für das Etikett verantwortlich ist.

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The woman behind this small family winery located in Martvili is Keto Ninidze, a former journalist. [She is co-author of the book A Gently Fermenting Revolution: Women in the Georgian Wine Business.] Ten years ago, she and her husband, Zaza Gagua, decided to leave Tbilisi and return to the home of Zaza’s great-grandparents in northwest Samegrelo in the foothills of the Caucuses to grow grapes (replacing a hazelnut orchard with vines) and make wine. 

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Gdy w Polsce zaczyna się okres jesiennej smuty, słońce jest z nami coraz krócej, a i tak bardzo często promienie słoneczne nie przebijają się przez grubą warstwę chmur, jest tani i szybki sposób, aby naładować swoje baterie na końcówkę roku. Tym rozwiązaniem jest obranie kierunku na południowy-wschód i wybranie się do niezwykłego kraju, jakim jest Gruzja!

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Three of my grandparents were born in Italy; they emigrated to America before World War I but never forgot their Italian childhoods. My Piemontese grandmother, Marie, often talked to me about her own grandmother. She lived simply in the country, had a pet pig called Cleopatra, made cheese from her cows’ milk, kept silkworms, extracted lanolin from sheep’s wool and grew vegetables and grapes for the family’s wine. I was resident in Italy for more than 20 years and spent much of that time living in – and writing about – rural communities in several regions. By then, European Union rules had ended this type of integrated agriculture. Even in areas where monoculture was shunned, it was no longer possible nor desirable to produce a little of everything.

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With its booming popularity, versatility at the table, and range of styles in which it’s made, rosé has become a year-round staple of most beverage programs. But consumers’ seasonal drinking preferences also make rosés an essential wine list feature when temperatures warm in the spring and summer. 

Though there are a handful of powerhouse players that become familiar—and sometimes a bit repetitive—on wine lists, there are others that sommeliers and beverage directors across the U.S. clamor for.

SevenFifty Daily spoke with 12 restaurant professionals to find out what they’re stocking up on as rosé season kicks off once again. (All wines are listed with price per bottle.)

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TBILISI, GEORGIA (Dagbladet): Til tross for at Vladimir Putins krigsmaskin invaderte landet i 2008, er Georgia og dets næringsliv fremdeles helt avhengig av tilgang til russiske markeder for å overleve.

Derfor har ikke georgiske myndigheter innført storstilte sanksjoner mot Russland etter Putins invasjon av Ukraina.

For det er kostnaden for stor, og alternative markeder for få.

Likevel har en rekke store og små georgiske selskaper de siste ukene annonsert i tur og orden at de vil slutte å selge sine varer og tjenester til Russland.

På tide, mener vinprodusenten og -bonden Keto Ninidze (38), som i årevis har nektet å forsyne Russland med sine edle georgiske vindråper.

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In this guide we cover 13 top things to see and do around Martvili, including the best places to stay, eat, and drink good wine. We also include a detailed map which you can download, and practical info on how to get to Martvili.

While Martvili is best known for its eponymous canyon, there is in fact much more to this lush region of Georgia. From sulphur springs and waterfall pools to hidden lake hikes and Megrelian feasts, there is plenty of encouragement to linger longer. Throw Karma Hostel into the mix – a relaxation haven – and it’s hard to drag yourself away from this chilled out corner of Samegrelo.

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In the early 2000s, there were few women making wine in Georgia; only one, Ana Godabrelidze, at Shumi Winery, was able to make enological decisions. Since 2010, the number of female winemakers in Georgia has grown. There was pushback due to the long-held beliefs that women do not belong anywhere near qvevri, the traditional terracotta vessel with some eight thousand years of history. Women like Marina Kurtanidze, the founder of the Association of Georgian Women Winemakers and the winemaker of Mandili-the first woman-owned and operated winery in Georgia-have been a great source of inspiration to women across Georgia who want to make wine but were unsure how to break through the glass ceiling and somehow leave behind a cultural norm of patriarchal ideas of who can make wine in Georgia. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Georgia struggled to find its identity. Georgian culture is deeply patriarchal, and winemaker and restaurateur Keto Ninidze, inspired by women who made the leap, uses her wine to send a message about Georgian women. Wine and food are part of a cultural identity she strives to preserve in her own unique feminist way.

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Since 2020, countless businesses—in the wine industry and others—have pledged to drive more equity and diversity with their work, primarily in response to national calls for greater protection of Black lives. Two and a half years later, many articles attest that few businesses have delivered on their promises. Were some of these promises empty, used to manage public perception with no plans to execute? Certainly. But I’d also like to believe that some of them were made with earnest intention to follow through, but roadblocks presented themselves.

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I am standing in one of the oldest ‘odas’ in the Samegrelo wine region of Western Georgia.  This is the name of the traditional Mingrelian wooden house which is raised from the ground on piles, here with ‘qvevri’ clay fermenting vessels buried in the ground floor and to the side of the house.

This oda belonged to Zaza Gagua’s great grandparents, who used to grow vines here near Martvili.  Eight years ago Gagua and his wife Keto Ninidze moved from Tbilisi to bring up their two daughters in Samegrelo’s beautifully wild mountainous countryside.

Keen to revive the tradition of viticulture, to the surprise of their neighbours, they immediately replaced the hazelnut groves with vines – and buried new lagvanis (as qvevris as known here) around the house.

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