The New Year began for the SVC Winery Project group with an interesting trip to Georgia, a country with a thousand-year-old winemaking tradition.
We landed in the capital where, as a testimony to this deep connection with wine, a statue of Kartlis Deda has been erected on the top of a hill, holding a goblet in her left hand as a sign of welcome.
Being at the same latitude as Rome, its climate is moderate, which allowed it to become the most prestigious supplier of wine to the Soviet Union in the second half of the 20th century, and then to gain acclaim in other nations around the world.
The first wine jars found and analysed by the Institute for Viticulture in Tbilisi contained grape seeds inside them dating back some 7,000 years.
This particular ageing technique, within the so-called ‘Qvevri‘, has been included in the UNESCO intangible heritage list since 2013.
Many of the cellars we visited took up this ancient tradition and buried the amphorae up to their necks, placing an airtight seal made of clay and beeswax to ensure that the ideal conditions for the wine were maintained.
In the Qvevri, the must is placed in contact with skins and stems, which deposit on the bottom and provide a wide range of aromatic compounds.
Georgia boasts about 500 types of indigenous varieties of which about 38 are actually used for wine-making.
The regions we visited, mainly Kakheti in the foothills of the Caucasus and Kartli in central Georgia, are among the most important from an oenological point of view.
There we had the pleasure of tasting different declinations of Saperavi, a thick-skinned variety with a high tannin content from which Kinsmarauli is made, Rkatsiteli, which is mainly used to make complex white wines or in combination with Mtsvane and Aleksandrouli.
As always, the mutual enrichment and exchange of technical information is one of the most rewarding aspects of the consultations carried out, especially on an international level.
