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| Gotsa chinuri pét-nat Kakheti 2021 Gotsa tavkveri Kakheti 2021 Sopramadze tsitska Imereti 2021 Sopramadze “6-type” Imereti 2021 Sopramadze chkhaveri Imereti 2021 |
| We are delighted to have our friend Stetson Robbins, the intrepid importer of wines from Georgia and beyond, in the house this week to pour a spectrum of wines from two vastly different Georgian winegrowers. I visited Georgia in 2011 to attend a wine seminar at the Alaverdi monastery in the eastern part of the country, and nearly fifteen years later, I have still failed to process all that I saw and tasted on that trip. It was, and I don’t know how else to put it, a mind-blowing experience for me, tasting hundreds of traditional Georgian wines, visiting ancient winemaking facilities (including the ruins of a 5th-century winemaking school, where we stood in a field atop a buried, 15,000-liter terracotta amphora), and gorging on the salty, sour foods that Georgians savor, accompanied by generous glugs of tkemali, the super-sour condiment that they use like ketchup. A fragment of my blown mind was witnessing two colleagues begin to kvetch about the food, complaining of its monotony, when I didn’t find it so, at all, happily feasting on a rustic, savory bean soup accompanied by a sort of corn cake, tender dumplings as big as your fist, wild mushrooms, a seemingly endless variety of breads, and the mounds of fresh herbs and pickles that accompanied nearly every meal. Hearing my colleagues bitch about the food was an object lesson about the pitfalls of traveling in a cognitive Winnebago where you expect and demand that everything conform to your sensibilities. It’s certainly easy to travel inside a cognitive Winnebago with all the comforts of home, and why even bother getting out of bed when it’s so cozy in your PJs? It’s also claustrophobic and you end up foreclosing opportunities that can expand your horizons and mind. And to be sure, traditional Georgian wine is one of those opportunities that may seem, at first, challenging to all that you hold dear in the wines you drink. Georgia is the cradle of wine, and with over eight thousand years of winemaking history and over five hundred autochthonous grape varieties, often made in buried terracotta amphorae, there is quite a lot to find challenging.
From the Kakheti region in the center-east of Georgia, we’re tasting three wines from Beka Gotsadze, starting with his crisp, dry pét-nat made from chinuri. Most Georgians use the saperavi grape to produce a darkly pigmented, full-bodied red wine yet there are many other red grapes seemingly born for making lighter reds, and we’re trying two of them during the tasting: a tavkveri from Gotsadze, and then a chkhaveri from Sopramadze. Sopramadze is from Imereti, in the west of Georgia, where the tradition is for shorter-macerated (or non-macerated) wines. |