Between August, when Georgia’s biggest winemaking region, Khakheti, begins to harvest, and December, when the last of the grapes are picked in the country’s balmier western regions, families and communities come together daily to labor in the vineyards, clean qvevri, sing songs, dance, cook, and share food and drinks when the work is done.
The art of the supra
Among the traditions that have taken root, none is more enduring than the supra.
Meaning “tablecloth” in Georgian, these ritual feasts united workers, families, and friends after the end of a long day of picking, sorting, and pressing grapes. The supra isn’t simply a meal. It’s a practice woven into the social fabric.
Food and wine flow in abundance. Mtsvadi (meat chunks cooked over grapevine twigs), tone (Georgian bread), ajapsandali (eggplant stew), khinkhali (soup dumplings), chakapuli (lamb stew overflowing with tarragon leaves and other herbs) khachapuri (the famous cheese-filled bread), tkemali (sour plum sauce). And of course, jug after jug of wine.
As guests feast, a tamada (toastmaster) holds court over the table, giving thanks to family, friends, God, and the ancestors who nurtured the vineyards before them. With every toast, glasses are emptied, the hosts pour more wine—often homemade—and the ritual repeats.
The supra is the invisible hand that guides life in Georgia, and when outside visitors volunteer to work the harvest, the supra is a certainty. That’s because they aren’t merely visitors. To Georgians, all guests are gifts from God.
While this might sound like a platitude, it’s truly a national mantra. Nowhere does this sense of hospitality manifest more than among the vines. “Anyone who helps us make wine will always be welcome,” says Gela Patalishvili, co-founder of Pheasant’s Tears Winery.
A banner year for crops
Throughout the rtveli this year, wineries in Khakheti—including our friends at Okro’s Wines and Pheasant’s Tears—have embraced sommeliers, brewers, writers, and drop-ins eager to get their hands dirty and learn more about Georgian winemaking traditions.
According to John Wurdeman, Patalishvili’s fellow co-founder, 2024 was a great year for them to do it. He thinks it might be a banner year for Khakhetian wines.
“With climate change, I was beginning to lose hope that we would ever have a ‘normal’ year again. There was rain when there shouldn’t be rain, hail, dry spells. The grapes were constantly stressed,” he explains. “But this year, everything was perfect.”
Mold and mildew weren’t issues. The grapes grew in abundance. In the two weeks before the harvest, the sun shone each day, allowing the grapes to ripen beautifully on the vine.
Khakheti—a temperate valley and former seabed sheltered by the Caucasus Mountains—might be best known for rkatsiteli, a white grape that yields a crisp, green apple-like taste, and saperavi, a juicy red grape with ripe tannins, but Georgia is home to 525 different kinds of grape.
Both Pheasant’s Tears and Okro’s have revived some of these rare treasures.
In the first week of September, Pheasant’s Tears began picking vardisferi rkatsiteli, or pink rkatsiteli. Wurdeman says the pink-hued grape is a genetic mutation of white rkatsiteli. “We don’t know why it turns pink. I’m not sure anyone does,” he says. “But it’s a beautiful grape.”
Around eight or nine years ago, Pheasant’s Tears began experimenting with these grapes. Wurdeman and Patalishvili made a small batch of wine with whatever they could harvest and took about 150 bottles to wine fairs in western Europe. Although Wurdeman had hoped to stash most of the supply away for his own restaurants, they were quickly bought up.
Realizing its potential, the winemakers made clippings and planted dozens of new rows. Ever since the floral, pink-hued wine with strong red berry notes has become a mainstay.
Thanks to the excellent conditions this year, the 2024 vintage should be a strong one, too.
Inside the qvevri
All Pheasant’s Tears and Okro wines are made following the ancient local customs. That not only means they are natural. It also means they are fermented and aged in qvevri.
For thousands of years, Georgian winemakers have used these clay amphorae to make wine. They lined them with beeswax and buried them underground, where the earth kept the wine at a stable temperature—and prevented invaders from destroying the supply.
Today, qvevri are still treated the same as they have always been, albeit with the aid of modern technology. Workers descend into the clay vessels with headlamps, remove leftover skins and stems by hand, and wipe them down with beeswax-lined cloths. Once clean, the workers funnel pressed juice into them, along with grape skins—and often the stems, too. The juice then macerates for anywhere from a few days to many months. This extended period of skin contact yields a distinct orange or amber color in white wines and a brilliant tannic profile in red wines.
As the grape juice bubbles in these underground amphorae, nestled in the earth like a child in the womb, other qvevri are cleaned and cleared of grape skins. The skins are then divided. Some will be turned into compost and others transferred to empty qvevri in wine cellars where they are used to make a different drink: chacha, a potent distilled spirit that’s similar to grappa and raki.
If wine is the undisputed number one in Georgia, then chacha might be the distant second. At any supra, guests can expect to be feted with enough of it to send their heads into the clouds.
Modern revival
Traditional practices and the sweeping diversity of grapes Georgians used to make wine nearly disappeared under Soviet rule. Today, however, they are enjoying a renaissance. This revival in large part is credited to wineries like Okro and Pheasant’s Tears.
Wurdeman and Johni Okruashvili of Okro’s Wines are founding members of Georgia’s Natural Wine Association. The organization, initiated to promote natural viticulture and traditional winemaking in Georgia, has more than 200 members today. And it continues to grow.
Thanks to their efforts, any guest who visits Khakheti in autumn, either to work the fields or enjoy the festivities, will find that the rtveli remains as rooted in Georgian history as ever. And they will find that the natural orange, rosé, and red wines from this ancient region benefit from more than the fertile soil and brilliant climate. Every bottle is enriched by 8,000 years of tradition.
Enjoy Georgian wine traditions in Thailand
You don’t have to travel to Georgia to experience the magic of the rtveli. You can try some of these outstanding Georgian wines in Thailand through us at Wine Garage through the wines of Pheasant’s Tears and John Okro.
Please contact us to order a bottle or for more information on these spectacular and storied wines.
Craig Sauers recently moved from Bangkok to Tbiblisi, Georgia, just in time for the harvest 2024.