Georgia - Origins of the world's oldest wine | Worldwide Wine Civilizations

Behind the peaks of the Caucasus, a protective wall against Russia's severe cold, high impassable valleys protect a territory that lives by and for its vineyards, Georgia. This country has always struggled for independence. Fortified villages along its borders with Chechnya and Dagestan are testaments to this history. Their old guard towers stand vigil over a thousand-year-old heritage, Georgia's vineyards. Because here the vines are everywhere. From the Caucasus foothills to the plains, to the banks of the Black Sea. They've adapted to every climate influence. To the west in the humid heat of the Black Sea, in the east to the cold of the Caspian, the icy winds of the northern steppes, and the hot winds coming from the deserts of Iran and Syria. The Georgians are proud to have a unique heritage of 500 indigenous grape varieties. More than any other major wine-producing country. Here, one doesn't ask how are you, but how is your vineyard? In Georgia, wine is sacred. That's my land too. I'll plant collection varieties here and on the other side too. Soliko Saichvili left the capital, Bilisi, to settle in the main wine region, Karaty. He started in viticulture after the fall of the Soviet Union. At that time, the vast collective vineyards were cut into thousands of small parcels. Each farmer was awarded a large acre of vines. On his land, Soliko is trying to build a collection of ancient vines. This grape is called the Khekvi. This rare grape variety had disappeared during the Soviet period. Here we planted the Karaty varietal. I wanted to plant at least 22 different varieties. The wealth of the Georgian vines is not only due to the immense variety of sepage. Soliko also wants us to discover the uniqueness of Georgian wine. Because here, in Karaty, every family has its vines, produces its wine, and shares it. The house of his friend, Gogi Nabilishvili, bears the imprint of this ancient tradition. It all takes place in an area dedicated to wine, the Murani. The secret of Karaty's traditional wines is that they are vinified in buried jars called Khevri. How long do you leave it in the Khevri? I leave it for the entire winter. I vinified it in the Khevri and for drinking, I put it in a keg. Soliko and Gogi make their wine in their own Khevri. Each year, they trade their experiences, their successes and failures. Five Khevri of red or white wine are buried under the ground. The wine should be drunk within the year. The wine oxides quickly in the jars and doesn't conserve well. Let's drink to this year's harvest and may it be even better next year. It still stings a little. Yes, it still has bubbles. For any Georgian, and especially for a Caucasian, wine is his pride. It's in our genes. My grandfather found this Khevri in the garden. He dug it up and in this Khevri, there were 150 silver coins. They dated from the 8th century. The pieces were from Iraq, the Middle East, a few from Egypt and even some from Andalusia. Soliko and Gogi share a common passion, to pursue and promote winemaking in Khevri, which had almost disappeared in the era of the Soviet Union's intensive viticulture, a tradition that reaches far back to ancient times. Wine jars are found in Georgia from every period of history, back to the earliest days of the sedentary civilization. Several ancient authors mention Transcaucasus and specifically the territory of Georgia as the land where the first grapes were cultivated. It's beneath the ground in southwest Georgia's arid plains, close to Armenia and Azerbaijan, that are found what may be the oldest traces of winemaking civilization. Nana Rushizvili is a paleobotanist. For years, by studying the morphology of grapeseeds found during excavations, she reconstitutes the history of the vine and its origins. For her and her team, the stakes are high. Proving definitively that here are the traces of the very first winemakers, from the Neolithic period. Nana seeks to determine when the vines were first domesticated. I take a sample where there may be some grapeseeds. Today, a piece of jar has been found. Buried jars have always been used to preserve food, but how to prove that they also contained wine? This fragment will be sent to be analyzed. We hope to find traces of wine by looking for the presence of tartaric acid in the pottery. If we achieve this, it'd be wonderful, because the main goal of our project is to prove the existence of the oldest wine in the world. Nana found grapeseeds probably dating from the Neolithic period, 8,000 years ago. It confirms that they come from domesticated vines, and not from wild ones. By carefully examining the grapeseeds, it's possible to specify if they were broken and by what means, and to know if they underwent severe pressure. Finding the crushed seeds in the bottom of the jar, probably with a grape press, that remained at the bottom, gives us the certainty that the wine was made naturally inside the jar. Indeed, there is a continuity in this wine culture. Which has not known a rupture until today. This is the oldest wine-conserving cavevry in the world. Not only in Georgia, but in the world. The shape and stylized grape clusters are the indicators. Finally, our analysis found traces of tartaric acid, which proves that this container was used to store wine. It is scientifically proven that humans knew what wine was, and that they experienced drunkenness already 8,000 years ago. But maybe even earlier, during the Stone Age, when they lived in caves and found wild vines. Later, when humans became sedentary, they began domesticating the wild vines. This land, composed of clay, and shaped by humans since the Neolithic times, marks the incredible continuity of cavevry wine, up until modern times. In Kareti, a few rare families still understand the secret of the ancient methods. How are you? Do you still drink wine? Obviously, what a question. I'll show you how to make a cavevry. Thanks to Remy and his son, Soliko was able to restore his cellar of cavevrys. This is the base of a cavevry, which will contain 2,000 liters of wine. We have to keep turning it a while longer. You only use the wheel at the beginning? Yes, just at the start. Then I'll continue without the wheel for the upper part. In the Kebelajvili family, this ancient knowledge continues to be passed down to the grandchildren. Here, it's said that it's more difficult to manufacture a cavevry than to build a house. The cavevry and its winemaking technique is so unique and tied to Georgian wine culture, that the wine from these jars is now inscribed as an intangible UNESCO World Heritage. It is the basis of an identity and a knowledge dating from ancient times that has finally been recognized. So explain this a bit, Remy. They have this form so that the must turns during fermentation. We did an experiment placing glass on the wall, and we observed that the must turns inside and gently settles down to the bottom. Inside a cavevry, you'll find three types of wine. Here we have a certain type of wine, and in the middle, you have the best wine in the cavevry. At the bottom, it's yet another wine. If its form was straight, everything would fall to the bottom, and the wine would not work. It would stay cloudy. Today, the demand is increasing. Before, there wasn't much demand. But things are better now. More and more people are installing private home cellars with 10 to 20 cavevrys. The revival of Georgia's wine is not a simple fad. It corresponds to the rebirth of a national identity after the time of the Soviet Union, that identity of a country and a population that only recently became accessible since Georgia's fragile independence. Today, Georgia's winemakers dream of existing on the great map of world wines. Soliko is one of the first to bottle his cavevry wine, traditionally reserved for personal consumption only. He's offering all of his small production for sale around the world. For the cavevry, wine is more than just a storage method. There are special vinification techniques. The grape juice, the must, is fermented with the mark. Because of this contact with the grape skins, stems, and seeds, Korete's wines develop their special powerful tannic flavor. Now, if you look well at the cavevry, it's giving birth to the wine. It even looks like a woman's uterus. It's no coincidence it has this oblong form. And it's not just the fact that it keeps it cool. Man created it like this. Perhaps unconsciously, when looking at this process, we see it resembles a birth. At the beginning, nobody believed me. Nobody took me seriously. When I started making jar wine, people laughed and said, what is this old and dirty method to make wine? There was even a derogatory term, meaning that cavevry wine smelled like a family's grub. I didn't care because I wasn't thinking of marketing it. It didn't interest me because I knew that cavevry wine wasn't bad. At first, only a few of us took this job seriously. And I'm very happy there are now many people who think the same. If we see a renaissance of our traditional Georgian wine and of the cavevry, it will be a victory. In Georgia, when they toast, wine is always associated with a victory, subjective to successive incursions from invaders. The vineyards and wines became a symbol of not only national strength, but also spiritual strength. Legend has it that when a Georgian warrior left to fight, he carried a piece of the vine in his belt. If he died on the battlefield, a vine grew there in his place. The Alaverdi Monastery has reigned over the vineyards in Kureti's Great Alanzani Valley since the 6th century. During the communist period, the buildings were abandoned, the church became a storage shed, and the vineyards were fallow. Father David, an Orthodox monk, is one of the leaders of this monastery and the Archbishop of Alaverdi. The monastery has been restored and Father David thought it important to begin the restoration with the wine cellar and the reconstitution of the monastery's vineyard. There was a legend on the other side of the Caucasus chain. The Chechens wondered where the strength of the Georgians came from. They thought these powers came from their faith and their icons and that their relics had magical powers. And the source of this power was in the vines and the sacramental wine. They thought they could defeat the Georgians if there was no more wine. That's why the first thing the invaders did was to pull up the vines and the first thing the Georgians did after their passage was to replant them. For Georgians, the vines are a symbol of power, a symbol of their faith, and a vital link with God. The memory of our ancestors who lived in the Garden of Eden. Because for Georgians, the vines are the path forward and if we follow this path, we will always be victorious. Father Gurasime is the monastery's winemaker monk. Here, all kvevri were replaced. The Soviets had used them as fuel tanks. This fermentation technology doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. This is a grapestock. It is very rich chemically. It's what gives the taste, color, and longevity to the wine. The monasteries were not the only ones to suffer during the Soviet times. The few castles that produced quality wine in the 19th century also disappeared, swept away by the revolution in favor of mass production winemaking. The destiny of Mokrani Castle reveals another face of Georgia's vines, that of modern companies and their vast vineyards. Today, the castle is trying to regain its past glories. The cellars were restored on the initiative of Jacques Fleury, a French businessman and a lover of Georgian wine. I arrived here on a Sunday in the winter of 2002 and saw this castle in ruins. The communists had preserved the building, but not the vineyards or even the winemaking tradition. They had preserved the building, but the Civil War, after Georgia's independence, was terrible, and people had looted everything they could. After returning from France in 1875, Prince Mokran, a member of the Bagration royal family, decided to modernize his vineyard. He single-handedly initiated a new era of Georgian winemaking. Following the model of Bordeaux's chateaus, he abandoned vinification and storage in the jars, switching to European methods. The Mokranili wine will travel all the way to Russia and become the exclusive wine of the tsars. He expanded his production lines, created an agricultural school, and his wine will be awarded a ribbon at the Universal Exhibition of Paris in 1889. His success is fleeting and ends the Bolshevik Revolution. His vineyards, like all others in the USSR, are collectivized. The castle becomes a Soviet wine factory before sinking into oblivion. Our goal is to recreate this story as it should have been, if there had been no communist parentheses. For this project, Jacques Fleury brought in a German winemaker living in Bordeaux, Patrick Onneff. Half of the wines he produces are made from Georgian grape varieties that were unknown 10 years ago. We're rediscovering the ancient grape varieties and creating new wines, assemblies not well known here, between European and Georgian varietals. We're adapting indigenous Georgian varieties to modern winemaking techniques. This is a new interpretation of the culture of Georgian wine, but it enlarges our wine horizons. Between the appearance of new companies using industrial methods and the revival of traditional wine from jars, Georgia is at a decisive turning point in its wine history. The two faces of Georgian wine must now learn to coexist if the 8,000-year-old legacy is to survive. But for now, the harvest is completed in the plains of the Kareti, and the wine is being borne in the jars. Soliko and his friends taste the wines that each has brought from his cellar and compare their creations. Here, they drink only the wine from their cavevries, with its unique amber color. Let's drink to this year's harvest, and to all the winemakers around this table. I welcome the success of this harvest, and as we say, I wish that we drink our wine for good reasons only. The Georgian banquet is a solemn and sacred ceremony, which follows a veritable liturgy. Tonight, Soliko directs as the master of ceremony. Here's to you. Your vineyards and your wine will always be the best because you're a good and wonderful person. All evening, he toasts in an ancient order of protocol. The banquet is the place of all celebrations, all praises. I propose a toast to all of us, human beings, vines, to this land, to the sky. In a final communion, the famous polyphonic singing celebrates the sacred bond between the people and their vineyards, their lands, their memory.