Wine

Buried in the ground. Coated in beeswax. Sealed with a stone or wooden cap. A qvevri (also written kvevri) is a large egg-shaped clay vessel that has been used to ferment and age Georgian wine for thousands of years.

The method is simple and strange. Grapes are pressed. The juice, skins, seeds, and stems all go in together. The vessel is sealed and left underground, where the earth acts as a natural temperature regulator. Six months later: wine.

The result is something you cannot replicate any other way. The grape solids impart tannin, texture, and a deep golden-amber color that is nothing like the whites you have tried before.

What the wine world now calls "orange wine" or "skin-contact white wine" has existed in Georgia for millennia. In Georgia, they simply call it wine.

The color ranges from pale gold to deep copper-amber depending on how long the grape skins were left in contact with the juice. The flavor is somewhere between a white wine and a red - tannins from the skins, the freshness of a white grape, but with a depth and texture that neither fully explains.

If you try nothing else, try a Rkatsiteli or Mtsvane made in a qvevri in Kakheti. This is Georgian wine at its most itself.

Almost every Georgian family makes wine. You will meet people this week who will offer you wine from their own qvevri, poured from an old plastic bottle with a label that says nothing except, implicitly, that it was made by this family, in this village, with grapes from that vineyard over there.