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| Tonight, please join us for a special tasting of unique wines from central and eastern Europe, with a focus on wines from Georgia. We have Stetson Robbins, longtime friend, and owner of the import company, Black Lamb Wines, in the shop to tell us all about them. Stetson worked for our one-time source of wines from these regions, Blue Danube (now, sadly retired), and is now our intrepid source for some of these same wines as well as new finds that are just as exciting. When I visited Georgia nine years ago, we landed in Tbilisi and promptly headed east to the Kakheti region, located at the foothills of the Caucuses mountains. In Kakheti, we visited the Alaverdi Monastery, an epicenter of traditional enology that kept the flame burning for Georgian traditional wine during the very darkest times of the Soviet era. Soviet central planners forbade growers from cultivating many of the hundreds of historic grape varieties, and as a consequence when the old varieties are conserved today, there is not a living soul who can recall farming these grapes for wine, much less how the wines tasted. During the Soviet era, the Georgians were compelled to overcrop their vines and pick as late as they could, yielding musts that were high in potential alcohol—they then watered back the wines to produce as much wine as they possibly could for export to Russia and elsewhere. The resulting wines were typically sweet and high in alcohol (even after the producers added water), and yet I didn’t taste a single drop of sweet wine in Georgia, as the Georgians do not seem to have a taste for it themselves (in general, Georgia is a country of savory gastronomy). It’s exciting to see Georgian traditional wine rise from the ashes, as there lies the oldest continuous grape wine culture in the world and the wines have a lot to tell us if we can open ourselves to them. The time I spent in Kakheti naturally biased me to the wines of this region, and I didn’t really understand that there were traditional wines made elsewhere in Georgia, with different winemaking regimes (e.g., shorter maceration periods) and different grapes (I know saperavi, but only learned of tavkveri a couple of years ago). Tonight, we are of course tasting wines from Kakheti, but also Kartli to the west, and Adjara, even further west, as well as a pet-nat and a light-bodied red Slovenia.
Kabaj “Hydra” San Lurinz Pét-nat Goriška Brda/Slovenia 2018 |