Patrick Honnef, the winemaker of Georgia’s Chateau Mukhrani recently spent weeks pouring his wines across New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. He returned with a bleak verdict: “Georgia is qvevri,” he says. “That’s it. And it hurts my heart.” Yet, winemaking in Georgia extends far beyond the clay vessels that define the country abroad.
In local parlance, any wine made in a qvevri is simply “Georgian style,” while all other vessels, like those used for direct-press, are deemed European. Authentic Georgian amber wine—also known as orange wine—is a structural philosophy: white grapes fermented and aged on their full skins, seeds, and stems for a minimum of five to six months. This extended maceration pulls pigment, tannin, and tension from the skins, resulting in a white wine built with the texture of a red and an amber or orange hue.
“Amber is only a small picture of our country and winemaking potential,” says Honnef. To him, selling Georgian wine strictly through qvevri is like selling wine from “Germany with Bavarian lederhosen and bratwurst,” he says. “That is not the image of a serious wine culture. It is the image of an emotional experience.”
When Georgian wines entered the U.S. market over a decade ago, the initial storyline was often framed as an unbroken 8,000-year-old tradition of fruit fermented in clay vessels buried in the earth. The market’s embrace of these wines was hardly automatic. It required reclaimed vineyards, drained bank accounts, and the relentless travel of winemakers determined to resurrect family estates lost to Soviet rule. They carried the wines outward by hand until the textured, savory style found a home within the natural wine movement, giving Georgia an identity the market could immediately grasp.
Yet, the danger of this successful export campaign is that it risks building its own boundary, what winemakers call an “amber ceiling.” While qvevri-fermented wines account for barely five percent of Georgia’s commercial production, in the U.S. they threaten to dictate the entire narrative.
Outgrowing the origin story
Despite that narrow framing, Georgian wine is gaining traction in the U.S. By 2024, shipments reached 1.07 million liters—a 58 percent jump in volume year-over-year, according to Wines of Georgia. The U.S. now pays around $6 per liter, among the highest premiums for Georgian wine globally. Although amber wines built the foundation, they are no longer the only bottles deserving of attention. “Georgia contains multitudes,” says Noel Brockett, the president of import company Georgian Wine House.
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