Lou Wine Shop

When I visited the Tbilisi national museum in 2011, I was startled to see displayed in a vitrine without fanfare a winemaking amphora of astonishing antiquity; a terracotta qvevri with wine tartrate crystals inside, carbon dated to 3000 BC. Since then, archaeologists have uncovered ever older winemaking artefacts in Geogia as well as in Iran, some dating to 6000 BC, and without making an unreasonable extrapolation we have been making wine longer than we have been making leavened bread. That is right: neolithic folks enjoyed wine for thousands of years before a baker launched the first boule into a wood burning oven. We were drinking wine when we were content to eat grain-based gruel, flatbreads, and crackers—not that there’s anything wrong with gruel. So, let’s say, not entirely arbitrarily, that we’ve been making wine for about ten thousand years. And it’s this simple fact that can help defuse the frustration that you might feel when you walk through the door of a wine shop other than BevMo, or confront a wine list peppered with unfamiliar names: you like this thing and want to put more of it in your mouth, but what in the hell is this thing, why this and not that? Like any other human endeavor with several millennia of experience behind it, we’ve had plenty of time to elaborate wine growing. Wine is complex because we’ve been working at it for a long time—but the complexity is a feature, not a bug. Isn’t it astonishing that we can experience something that matters to us, that also mattered to our distant ancestors, too?

The origins of wine are likely in ancient Georgia. In the east of the country, in Kiketi, hard against the Caucasus mountains, the widest biodiversity of wild grape types may still be found. A hypothesis that I learned from Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma is that there’s a good chance that where you find the greatest number of wild biotypes of a now-domesticated plant, that’s where cultivation of it began. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, agronomists have recovered over four hundred autochthonous Georgian grape varieties. During the Soviet era, central planning stepped on grape farming and allowed commercial cultivation of only a handful of the most highly productive grapes. During my trip to Georgia, we visited the state agricultural station in Kiketi where an agronomist described how they have struggled to capture as many of the historic cultivars as they could, but explained, wistfully, that we have lost so much regarding their cultivation. For most of these old varieties, there’s not a living soul that’s tasted wine made from them, and we are ignorant of the best soil types for each grape.

Georgia is not only the origin point of wine, but also for orange wine, or as the ancient Georgians referred to it, “wine.” (The Friulian winegrower Josko Gravner brought the practice of orange winemaking back to Italy after visiting Georgia in the 1980s.) And that’s why I laugh when someone kvetches about the ostensive FOMO faddism surrounding orange wine, as if orange wine is simply a passing fancy (one that’s only about ten thousand years old), because faddism has never, ever affected the wine trade. That said, winemaking in Georgia itself is a moving target, with old school traditionalists continuing to make their long-macerated wines while new school growers are trying their hand at making wines that see shorter or even zero maceration. Generally speaking, wine growers in the Kiketi region cleave to the old ways, and six months of maceration on the skins and seeds is common. Wine growers in Imereti, in the west of the country, favor far shorter periods of maceration or even zero maceration, but many still use the terracotta qvevri of their ancestors.

Tonight, we are pleased to have our long-time comrade and importer of Georgian wine, Stetson Robbins, in the shop to pour us wines that express both streams of Georgian winemaking.