In Georgia, Wine Forges National Identity—and Deep Pride

20.12.2024 - 13:21 / cntraveler.com

Editor's note: This story was reported in the summer of 2024. Recently, Tbilisi has marked by protests against the government, and harsh crackdowns on activists—the history of its wine is just one peephole into the country's political tensions, though far from the complete story. We encourage you to read more for a fuller picture.

“How do you know when it's ready to harvest?” I think aloud, staring at what is, now, just a dusty bunch of grapes.

Third-generation winemaker Bacho Burjanadze holds the fruit up for us, a group of sixteen travelers who just met this morning. “You see this mist?” he says, rubbing a film of natural yeast off the grape’s skin to reveal shiny sea-green flesh below the brown nebula of sugar. Last season’s late hail ruined much of the harvest, but this year has been warm and dry. Burjanadze is optimistic, and the sugar and yeast are good signs.

We are at the Burjanadze winery in Khakheti, Georgia’s most famous wine region located a two-hour drive east of Tbilisi, depending on how hard you take the hairpin turns. The Caucasus mountains loom over the vineyards. We're here during the first rtveli of the season, which is a yearly ritual when workers return home to make wine and feast. There are a number of tours that simulate the harvest experience for visitors, but this one is the real deal: Grapes picked as we go, while learning from Burjanadze, will become wine.

Grape harvesting in Kakheti, Georgia, the country's most famous wine region just a couple hours outside the capital of Tbilisi.

We are handed secateurs and wide-brimmed hats, each of us set to task working along the alleys between vine rows, clipping each bunch of fruit at its base and tossing the juicy grapes into plastic buckets. After an hour we’re sweating under the sun. In the bus on the way over, someone joked how Western it was that we were paying to do this labor, a punchline that continues to rattle around in my head. But before we know it, the feasting hour arrives and we move indoors, just as the light dapples through the windows of the farmhouse.

Burjanadze’s mother lays a low table with breads, cheeses, and shashlik (cubes of grilled meat). Though she doesn’t speak English, she stands over the table proud of her family’s world—the one that we, as tourists, have come to see. With little cups of chacha, a Georgian grappa-like brandy named after the sound made by stomping on grapes, we toast the harvest now bulging in bin bags around us.

Wine is one of the main pillars of our national identity.

“When Georgian soldiers went to war, they would always carry a sapling in their pocket so that if they died, a vine would grow," Burjanadze explains. In the late summer haze, none of us challenge whether this is fact or