Qvevri Wine in Georgia: What It Is and Where to Try It

Oldest finds

c. 6000 BC

On the skins

5-6 months

UNESCO

2013

Glass in Tbilisi

6-15 GEL

Spend an evening around Georgian wine and someone will say the word qvevri, with a look that is half pride and half challenge. It is not a marketing term and not simply a clay pot: it is the vessel and the method that make Georgian wine taste like nowhere else, and the reason wine people from abroad come here in the first place. This page is the narrow deep dive on the vessel itself. The wider picture, the grapes, regions, supra and history, is in our wine culture guide; the cellars to visit are in the wineries guide.

What a qvevri is

A qvevri (ქვევრი; churi in western Georgia) is a large earthenware vessel shaped like an egg or a handleless amphora, with a pointed base and a narrow neck, used to ferment, store and age wine. Sizes run from 20 litres to 10,000, with about 800 litres typical for a family cellar. The inside is coated with beeswax, and the vessel is buried in the ground or set into the floor of the marani, the cellar, so that only the neck and its lid show. The clay matters: it is chosen for the minerals it gives the wine, and the vessels are still made by hand in a handful of villages, Vardisubani in Kakheti, Shrosha, Makatubani, Tqemlovana and Chkhiroula in Imereti, Atsana in Guria, by families who have passed the craft down for generations. Large clay jars for storage exist in many countries; only Georgia, Spain and Portugal ferment wine in them, and only Georgia never stopped.

The archaeology is in the Kvemo Kartli plain south of Tbilisi: excavations at Dangreuli Gora, Gadachrili Gora and the village of Imiri turned up grape pips and qvevri from the sixth millennium BC, about 8,000 years ago. Georgia put qvevri making and qvevri winemaking on its own intangible heritage registry in 2011, and UNESCO added the method to its world list in 2013.

Why it is buried

Because it works. The earth holds the vessel at a near-constant temperature through a fermentation that would otherwise overheat and through a winter that would otherwise freeze it, with no cooling jackets and no cellar climate control. The egg shape does the rest: the wide belly keeps the cap of skins moving during fermentation, and the pointed base collects the pips and sediment so that the wine above clears on its own. The tannin the wine picks up from months on the skins is a preservative; qvevri makers say their wine is stable by nature and needs no added sulphur to keep, and the tannin limits the proteins that would otherwise cloud it. Buried clay is not a romantic gesture. It is a temperature-controlled, self-clarifying fermenter designed several thousand years before anyone had the words.

How the wine is made

Kakheti and Imereti

Qvevri wine is not one style. The two methods to know are named for the regions that keep them. The Kakhetian method, in the east, is the archaic and extreme one: the whole mass of skins, stalks and pips goes in and the wine stays on it for months, which gives the deep amber colour, the tannin and the weight that people mean when they say Georgian amber wine. The Imeretian method, in the west around Kutaisi, is the moderate one: only part of the pomace goes in, usually without the stalks, and the wine is drawn off sooner, so it is paler, lighter and fresher. Neither is more authentic; Imereti's wetter climate and its grapes, Tsolikouri and Tsitska, want less extraction. A first-time taster who decides after one Kakhetian glass that qvevri is not for them has tasted half of it.

What it tastes like

Amber qvevri whites taste of dried apricot, quince, walnut, honey and black tea, with a grip of tannin that white wine never normally has and a savoury, faintly earthy finish that people call beautiful or strange depending on how much natural wine they already drink. They are closer to a light red in weight, and they are served a little warmer than a white: too cold flattens them. Qvevri reds, mostly Saperavi, come out darker and more structured than the same grape from a tank, black fruit with earth and spice. The wines are made for the table, not for sipping alone: the tannin handles lamb, walnut sauces and cheese, and the acidity cuts through khachapuri.

Why it matters here

The qvevri sits where hospitality, religion, family and national pride meet. The oldest evidence of winemaking anywhere is in Georgian ground, and the method it points to is still in use, which no other wine country can say. The Soviet decades turned Kakheti into a bulk supplier and favoured volume in steel, and the family qvevri in the yard is what kept the tradition alive through them; when the Russian embargo of 2006 cut off the market that took most of the exports, the revival of qvevri wine is what gave Georgia something the rest of the world wanted to taste, and winemakers in Europe and America now buy the vessels and bury them. The wine is inseparable from the supra, the feast with toasts where the host's own qvevri wine is what fills the glasses, and from rtveli, the harvest that brings families back to the village to fill the vessels each autumn.

Where to try it

Our wine bars guide has hours and prices for a dozen Tbilisi bars, the wineries guide has booking terms for the cellars, and the Kakheti day trip guide costs the four ways of getting there.

How to order it

What it costs

At the National Bank's rate on 29 September 2026, 6 GEL is about $2.30 and 58 GEL about $22. Bottles in the wine shops run from the price of a glass to well over 100 GEL for a small producer's single-qvevri wine; buy from a shop with a named producer on the label rather than a souvenir stall, and ask, because the staff in the good shops taste everything they sell.

Mistakes

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