About 50 kilometres south of Tbilisi, near the town of Marneuli in Kvemo Kartli, lie two small Stone Age village mounds: Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora. Around 8,000 years ago, people there lived in round mud-brick houses, farmed, and kept animals.
They also made wine.
The evidence
In 2017, an international team of scientists published their analysis of pottery fragments from these villages in the journal PNAS. Inside the clay jars they found chemical traces of grape wine, dating to around 6000 BC.
That is the oldest known evidence of grape wine anywhere in the world. Older traces of fermented drinks exist elsewhere, for example in China, but those were mixed drinks made from rice, honey and fruit. For wine made from grapes, the story as we know it today begins here.
Some of the jars were decorated with what look like clusters of grapes, as if the people who made them wanted everyone to know what was inside.
The qvevri
What makes Georgia special is not only how old its wine is, but that the tradition never stopped.
Georgians still make wine in the qvevri (ქვევრი): a large, egg-shaped clay vessel, buried in the ground up to its neck. Crushed grapes, often with their skins, stems and seeds, are poured in and left to ferment and mature underground, where the temperature stays cool and steady. The vessel is sealed and opened months later.
In 2013, UNESCO added the ancient Georgian traditional qvevri wine-making method to its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Today, many winemakers still make wine in qvevri, especially in Kakheti, Georgia’s main wine region, where most of the country’s grapes are grown. White grapes fermented on their skins in qvevri produce the amber-coloured wines that wine lovers around the world now call “orange wine”.
More than a drink
In Georgia, wine is part of family life, faith and history. Vines appear carved on old churches, and the traditional feast, the supra, is guided by a toastmaster, the tamada, raising toasts to family, friends, the dead, and the homeland.
For 8,000 years, through invasions and empires, Georgians kept planting vines and burying qvevri in the ground. Few traditions on Earth have lasted that long without a break.