For Andrew Jefford, the qvevri is a linking thread that connects an 8,000-year winemaking tradition with the contemporary wine world’s growing fascination with the rediscovered “sixth genre of wine.”
For 36 years, I’ve wandered a land without borders. It ends in high-latitude or high-altitude places where frosts bite early, bite hard, and bite late. It ends where the rain stops falling or where the seasons merge, only to restart, once Vitis vinifera feels comfortable again, on the other side of our planet’s equatorial bulge.
I’ve asked questions, listened to answers, written down what I saw, what I heard, what I tasted. I’ve moved my home within this land—twice. I’ve watched this land, this Vinland, this wine land, expand dramatically over the past 36 years. I’ve seen it leap forward in time. I’ve seen it leap backward in time, too.
Both matter to us. If we don’t understand what came before, we can’t make sense of where we’re going, of what will come afterward. Ignore the past, and we start in year zero—a place of extreme danger.
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Is there a thread that links wine’s deep past with wine’s future? Perhaps there is. It may be the object that’s brought us all here, to Kakheti, to the heart of the Caucasus: the qvevri. We have living threads, too. Georgian winemakers who have worked with qvevris for many years, who know what it is to build a qvevri, to install it in a marani (winery), to season it for use, to entrust it with fruit: the work and the hopes of a season. And then to open it, with human trepidation, after the passage of some months. Then to nurture and bottle its contents, to extract its residues, and to clean it. To give it back to the future, and to give its wine to the world.
What follows is a brief account of the qvevri—as the borderless land of wine has come to know it in recent years. I’ll tell this story as innocently as possible, through the vehicle of astonishment. Astonishment, despite familiarity, is what we owe to those gifts we’ve been given by deep human time: wheels, bricks, spindles, looms, plows—and pots.
Thanks to the work of David Lordkipanidze, Stephen Batiuk, and their many colleagues, we have over the past decade come to know about the early Neolithic settlements of Shulaveris Gora and Gadachrili Gora in Kvemo Kartli. We know that five pottery samples from Gadachrili and three from Shuluveris tested “positive for tartaric acid and other organic acids (malic, succinic, and citric acid) found in grape and wine.” These samples date back 7,800 to 8,000 years and constitute the oldest residues of pure grape wine yet found anywhere on Earth.1
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The pottery samples are fragments of jars with “small and seemingly unstable” bases, though there’s no evidence that they were wholly or partially buried. We can’t therefore say that these fragments came from qvevris as we understand the term today. The earliest positive identification of qvevris found so far in Georgia comes from the Iron Age rather than Neolithic times, 2,700 to 2,800 years ago.2 And the earliest evidence that qvevris were routinely buried comes from later times still, some 1,600 years ago.3 However, the Areni-1 cave complex in Armenia, around 200 miles (320km) south of these Georgian sites, does contain buried jars as part of its winery installations. This site dates back 6,000 to 6,100 years.4 Today’s political boundaries and borders are anecdotal. What matters in deep human time is that these two places are two to three weeks apart—by foot.
A birthing space
Why create qvevris? What need led to this? What problem did they solve? To guess at an answer, let’s imagine the lives of our early ancestors.
They lived in a world of danger, want, craft, and mystery. Analysis of 170 Neolithic skeletons from France indicates an average life expectancy of between 25 and 28 years. Human remains in a Bronze Age necropolis in Austria indicate a life expectancy of just 24 years.5 No minute of those short lives would have passed without danger from animal predators, from injury and disease, from natural catastrophe, from sudden acts of human violence. These were truly stressful lives.
Hunger would have been salved by feast, but not often. Most days of most lives would have been hungry ones, and the search for safe water and food unremitting. These are existential anxieties.
Whatever might bring help or comfort must be crafted, nearby. Every item of clothing had to be won from the environment and from animals. From oily, dung-smeared wool; from fur and skin to which decomposing meat residues clung; from dried gut, tree bark, tough grass. Every tool had to be cut, shaped, finished. Shelter required woodwork or stonework; fire meant wood-gathering; food required constantly renewed weaponry, hunting skills, cultivation techniques, storage vessels.6
And then there were the mysteries. The crowded stars, jostling each other in the sky above on cloudless nights and winking down their opaque messages. The pulse of the seasons, always uncertain. Thunder and lightning: universal rage. Fog: the abolition of the known. The creatures of darkness, who thrived when thriving shouldn’t be possible. The joy and agony of reproduction. Implacable death.
And then there was the transformation of vine fruit into a strange beverage that brought comfort and laughter. The solace of wine can mean much to us. It surely meant far, far more to our ancestors. It was respite from stress, fear, pain, and labor. It was a chance to take part in mystery.
Without vessels, wine and the changed states it brings couldn’t be mastered. Without vessels, this respite and this bliss would be matters of hazard. The making of a vessel that might serve both for the transformation of grapes into wine and for the storage of that wine was a significant act. More than that, the form that this particular vessel took would have seemed right, respectful, and propitiatory. It was crafted from moistened earth, the place from which all life seemed to come, then made durable and permanent by another mysterious gift, that of fire. It was shaped like the eggs of birds, or like the wombs in which children crouched before birth. Once made, the vessel could be given back to the earth, for safe keeping. It could be hidden, and its precious contents could lie hidden within it.
What of the space inside it? That space was a place of radiance and transformation. Even today, few of us fully acknowledge the fulcrum of fermentation. There is only one winemaker—it’s a single-celled microorganism called yeast. Our ancestors would have seen a filled qvevri become a living thing, alive with warmth and movement; they’d have seen the space inside become a birthing space. They’d have felt the cradle warmth prolonged by the clutch of the earth.
Since humans stand over buried jars, and since weighty CO2 crawls, snake-like, across floors and toward doors, the toxic excrement of fermentation need not have claimed sacrificial victims. Of course, accidents would have happened, especially in enclosed spaces such as caves. Accidents would have brought knowledge and provoked respect.
Our ancestors would have seen and smelled when this time of danger comes to an end. New, troubled wine would have been quickly taken and consumed—until seasons of plenty showed that restraint pays dividends. Hence the use of the lid and the seal, and the months of rest, rewarded by wine of greater polish and poise.
The technique of the farmer and vine-tender is founded on seasonal rhythms. The springtime rituals of sowing, shaping, and pruning are a donation; harvest is gift and acceptance; the cycle is one of custodianship and renewal. Trust and circularity are hallmarks of the cycle. This would have been evident to those removing the residues of winemaking from a qvevri: exhausted skins, stalks, and pips, ready to be returned to the place from which they came, some months earlier, and for the process to begin again.
Let’s summarize. The creation of the wine jar and the qvevri was a technological innovation of great significance. This pure-wine timeline stretches back 8,000 years. Georgian winemakers are still using this innovation in a manner substantially unchanged from what may have been Neolithic practices. This technology has given the wine world back its sixth wine genre, of which more in a moment. This genre is increasingly influential in the modern world.
These are some of the reasons why I referred, a little earlier, to the leap back in time. Yes, we’re living in a world of drone-monitored precision viticulture, of cryoextraction and spinning cones, of optical sorting, of microoxygenation, and of reverse osmosis. These are some of our leaps forward. But a leap backward may also take us forward. It’s not a technical fix; it’s a creative avenue. And this is one we almost lost.
The sixth genre of wine
My subject is the qvevri, so I won’t dwell on Georgia’s genetic treasure chest: more than 400 indigenous grape varieties from nine different Georgian regions,7 together with as many wild-vine genotypes.8 Some merely exist and seem to offer little. Many wait for full expression. Two may have found it: Rkatsiteli and Saperavi. A rare few may serve us well for the coming climate battles ahead, and for the ongoing struggle against vineyard disease. The fact that 95% of Georgia’s wine comes from indigenous varieties and that at least 30% of the country’s wine is home-made underscores Georgia’s singularity.
Georgia’s 8,000 years of history, meanwhile, have been almost terrifyingly eventful. The country’s geographical position might seem to be a naturally defensive one. High mountain ranges lie to the north and south, while the Likhi Range at its center forms a saddle. Its western boundary is a sea coast. The Caucasus, though, has long been one of the world’s most strategically significant land corridors. It’s a waymark on the Silk Road, and a hinge between Asia and Europe. Any passage from the southern Caspian Sea to the Black Sea must transit through Tbilisi and Kutaisi. It’s a hinge, too, between the early, settled farming civilizations of the Fertile Crescent and the often rapacious, militarily accomplished, and highly mobile nomads of the Asiatic north.
Georgia has often found itself between empires, scuffed and bruised. Invaders repeatedly brought misery, destruction, and despair to Georgia’s Indigenous peoples. They’ve had to fight and to shed blood almost as often as they’ve made wine.10 Historians, of course, recount the destiny of royals, nobles, and warriors, not of the multitude of Georgians who attempted to tend their vineyards and guard their maranis in times of violent upheaval. Throughout most of those 80 centuries, though, qvevris have been buried in Georgian soil, with wine hidden inside them.
There’s no country on Earth for which the vine and wine are a more intimate part of national identity than Georgia. It was St Nino who brought Christianity to Georgia in the 4th century, and her symbol is a drooping grapevine cross-bound with her own hair.11 Georgian soldiers are said to prepare to die with pips or vine cuttings in their pockets, so that vines might sprout from their corpses.12 The beautiful hymn “Shen Khar Venakhi” (“Thou Art a Vineyard”), its sparse text supposedly crafted by the 12th-century former king Demetre I in his monastic cell, is lovingly addressed to a vineyard in Eden.13
Consider just one episode among hundreds. Timur Lang (Tamburlaine) decided during the winter of 1387 that he would convert Georgia to Islam. An ominous decision; this was the same year that Timur had laid waste to Isfahan, leaving behind (according to an eyewitness) 28 mounds, each containing around 1,500 severed heads.14
Georgia’s King Bagrat V and his son Giorgi VII resisted conversion over the 18 years until Timur’s death in 1405—though this resistance saw the vineyards of Kakheti uprooted, churches and monasteries burned with their worshippers and monks locked inside them, Tbilisi twice ravaged, Inner Kartli laid to waste, garrisons hacked to death, and Georgi himself chased through many of the forests of his kingdom. When Timur’s forces left a village, “not a cock crowed, not a dog barked.”15
But the vineyards of Kakheti were replanted. It’s important, when we consider the significance of the qvevri, that we remember the struggle and endurance that lies behind its persistence and survival over 80 centuries.
The world now has white wines, made of pressed juice. We have red wines, made of juice macerated with black-grape skins, with pips, sometimes with stems. Pink wines began as pale reds but are now often directly and reductively pressed from red grapes, leaving them pretty as petals—a third genre. We’ve had fortified wines since the 17th century and sparkling wines since the early 18th. Genre four, genre five.
What the world forgot about, though, was white wines vinified in the same way as red wines: vinified with skins, pips, and sometimes stems. This is the sixth genre of wine. Such wines are deep yellow, gold, amber, or orange. Thanks to the qvevri tradition, Georgia never forgot about the sixth genre of wine, but it came close.
Georgian winemaking confidence and ambition during the 19th century was firmly directed toward international wine styles, often exemplified at the time by German and French models. Marr, Lenz, Chavchavadze, Massano, Kipiani, and others laid the groundwork for what might have been a 20th-century Georgian wine culture in the Caucasus to match those of France, Germany, or Austria in Western Europe—one based on international models but in which local winemaking traditions, including the use of qvevri, would have continued to play a part. One not dissimilar, in fact, to today’s scene.16
It wasn’t to be. Oidium, peronospora, and eventually phylloxera harried Georgia. Hybrids replaced Georgian indigenous varieties in smallholdings in the early 19th century, but overall plantings plunged. A brief period of political independence from 1918 was quickly extinguished.
Georgia’s 70 years as a Soviet Republic—a history that began in 1921—saw plantings resume, swell, and eventually balloon, reaching an unsustainable 150,000ha (370,650 acres) in 1980.17 Then came collapse, after the institution of Mikhail Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol drive in 1985.
It’s only since the restoration of independence in 1991 that Georgians have been able to resume the work of these 19th-century pre-phylloxera pioneers and return the sixth genre of wine to a world now ready for it and curious to discover it.
Uniting wine’s past with wine’s future
I mentioned earlier that the qvevri may be the object that unites wine’s past with wine’s future. Can this really be true?
Qvevris are laborious to build, complicated to install in a marani, challenging to use as fermentation vessels, difficult to clean. When used for red wines, a qvevri is a semi-conventional fermentation vessel—but of relatively small size, thus potentially problematic. If such red wines see oak, it’s the oak that the drinker is likely to notice, rather than any qvevri influence.
Qvevri white wines in the Khakheti style are an acquired taste, and sometimes divisive. In the lighter Imereti style, by contrast, the effects of skin contact in a churi (the Imeretian name for a qvevri) may pass almost unnoticed. If a qvevri is used for juice alone, it’s no more than a container with attractive properties of thermal inertia. Some 95% of Georgian wine goes nowhere near a qvevri. Given that total Georgian production in 2023 is estimated by the OIV (International Organisation of Vine and Wine) at 1.5 million hl, that means that total Georgian qvevri production (at 75,000hl or less) is around half the production of AOC Costières de Nîmes in 2023.18 A few drops in a wine-world lake, in other words.
Outside Georgia, concrete eggs, ceramic jars, and “amphorae” are far more widely used than true Georgian qvevri. Those purchasing, shipping, and using qvevri outside Georgia don’t always trouble to bury them. All of this is true. Yet what at first seems insignificant may have an outsize influence on the way the future unfolds.19 My argument for the significance of qvevri wines—as Vinland hurtles into the future—is threefold.
I’ve outlined a little of Georgia’s long wine history. The world is coming to know Georgia as “the place where wine began.” Wine is deeply cultural; wine seeps history from every pore. If you read Homer, you read about wine. If you read the books of the Bible, you read about wine. If you read the poems of Li Bai and of Rumi, you read about wine. If you read Chaucer or Shakespeare, you read about wine.
In this context, “the place where wine began” is a place of immense significance. There are, we hope, many millions of unborn wine drinkers. They’ll approach this place and its wines for themselves, with no little curiosity and maybe reverence, too. Through the qvevri tradition, those drinkers have a chance to taste wine as it may have been thousands of years ago: unchanged, unadulterated, unmediated. This is a unique prospect.
The natural
Views on so-called natural wine differ. Not every qvevri wine is produced according to natural-wine principles. And not every qvevri wine produced according to natural-wine principles is a beautiful example of wine’s sixth genre.
Some of the finest qvevri wine producers consequently try to distance themselves from the world of natural wines. Qvevri wine and natural wine are different propositions.
For all that, the natural-wine movement (whatever its intermittent and specific failings) is the most significant force for change within the wine world in the 21st century thus far. Not because of its obsessions and phobias, but rather because of its ideal of naturalness. And because of its spirit: of good-natured anarchy. Because it doesn’t flaunt codes and conventions; because it doesn’t stratify, forbid, and exclude; because it doesn’t require refined taste, study, initiation, and “prestige.”
When young drinkers turn to wine, they often do so because it’s agricultural rather than industrial. They do so because wine promises limpidity, purity, and truth to source, rather than trickery and chicanery. They do so because most wines have “a grower” rather than being produced by a corporation. They do so because this sincerity, this informality, and this quest for purity might belong to them rather than to their elders.
This is the appeal not just of something called natural wine but of “the natural-in-wine.” The natural-in-wine is well on its way, now, to becoming a universal ideal to which all wines aspire, fine wines included. Organics and biodynamics in the vineyard are a part of this endeavor. That ideal is most simply articulated through the name or the signature of the creator, understood to be working in sympathy with nature, rather than through a crust or screen of appellations and classifications.
Qvevri wines, in outline, represent the pinnacle of this ideal. To take harvested fruit, to put it in a vessel in the earth, and then to let nature take its course for six months, closely observed, through the different stages of the fermentative process, before drawing off the wine to be bottled—nothing could be more “natural” than that. Qvevri is a magnet, and this magnet is pulling the rest of the wine world toward the ideal that it represents.
Texture at its most compelling
Wherein lies the deepest satisfaction in wine? Balance would be one of the usual answers—the hallmark of many good and great wines. It’s not necessarily a marker for deep satisfaction, though, since simple wines can be balanced. (Drinkability, by the way, is the child of balance.)
Many would flourish the word “terroir” at this point, meaning some unique quality or qualities in a wine that can be attributed to a wine’s physical origins alone and that seem to distinguish the finest wines of all from their peers and cohorts. These qualities exist but, in most instances, elude ready definition. Like a whisper or a watermark, you might know they’re there, but you’ll struggle to identify them inside the noise or beneath the print generated by variety, vintage, vinification, and élevage.
“Minerality” is still more slippery. In most critical practice, the term conveys ideological approbation above all. It tends to be used of wines before which the taster wishes to genuflect, rather than of those whose flavors genuinely retreat from fruit toward non-fruit notes (the closest we can come to a definition of this nebulous term).
How about fruit itself? As with the melodic line in music, quality is all. The fruit range runs from banal to sublime. Concentration can be artificially generated; too much is as bad as not enough. No one would make a case for alcohol on its own; and almost no one for acidity, other than as a factor of balance. Acidity, too, is plural and multivalent, like fruit: Its quality is all. We’re in the realm of the subjective, in other words. So, let me make a subjective suggestion: For me, the deepest satisfaction in wine is related to texture.
There’s a reason for this. Texture at its most compelling comes from grape skins; and in some instances, pips and stems, too. Yes, there is personality and expressive force in fermented juice, but it’s supplemented by the personality and expressive force that comes from skins, pips, and stems.
The vine is both fruit and plant tissue. We hear the whisper of place from both fruit and plant tissue. Fermented juice transmits fruit. The textural qualities in wine derived from skins, pips, and stems represent, by contrast, a fractional transmission of plant tissue. And not texture alone; there’s a flavor element to this transmission. Texture is also flavor. In this way, the whole plant can be present in wine.
I’d also point out that, for this process to satisfy, there must be achieved ripeness both of fruit and of those tissues that play a role in fermentation and maceration. Ripeness is, for me, another element of deep satisfaction.
In my experience, when wines have the potential to convey a sense of profundity, a textural personality is usually at work, meshing with fruit quality. I’m not suggesting that unmacerated wines have no texture, by the way. Their textural qualities vary significantly and can be exquisite. You may, too, have skin maceration for white wines without the use of qvevri, generally for some effect of perfume or varietal character. (For red wines, of course, this topic has long been central.)
Qvevri, though, has opened minds and palates around the wine world to the possibility of significant textural pleasure in white, gold, or amber wine. And also to a completely different repertoire of flavor, since the use of qvevri takes ripe fruit flavor on an unusual journey via the deepening of its relationship with both yeast and plant tissue. It might begin in the orchard, but it travels via fungi, umami, straw, and sous-bois to yeast-derived protein and vegetative plenty. If you grew up with fruity wines, this can disconcert. It’s an acquired taste. Wine itself, though, is an acquired taste. Tastes can be acquired.
Qvevri, in sum, is an avenue to white, gold, or amber wines of variously rich texture, wines whose architecture of flavor is derived from a harvest in which the whole vine might find an outline. This avenue stretches back thousands of years—and will stretch forward thousands of years, too, beyond all of our lifetimes. The story does not stop here. ▉
This is an edited version of a speech given at the Qvevri in Focus conference, Tsinandali Estate, Kakheti, Georgia, December 1, 2024.
