Qvevri Confusion - and what it has to do with Wine Industry Woes

Georgia's skin-fermented amber wines are a flea when set against the elephant of the world's wines, but maybe they - and more specifically the way they are received - offer broader lessons

Confusingly, this post both is, and is emphatically not, about Georgia’s qvevri wines. Please bear with me.

Familiar to wine critics and the vinous chatterati across the planet, qvevri amber or ‘orange’ wines, produced by fermenting and macerating white grapes for months in buried clay amphora-like pots, represent a very, very tiny niche. But, in several ways, I see them as emblematic of the wine industry as a whole.

First, the niche: Georgia, where the vast majority are produced, makes less than 1% of the world’s wines. Only 5% of Georgian wines sold in the domestic or export markets are made in qvevris, and some of these are red. So, if all wines were distributed equally across all routes to market, a wine drinker in the UK or US would, by my estimation, have a 1 in 2,000 chance of encountering a qvevri amber wine.

Rare as hen’s teeth

Given the disproportionate presence of these wines in Georgia and a limited number of metropolitan markets, however, the chances of an average, not particularly adventurous, wine drinker who doesn’t frequent Michelin-starry restaurants or hipster wine bars ever hearing about qvevri wines, let alone tasting one are only slightly better than zero.

But what about the people who defy these odds and buy their first bottle or glass? What are they going to experience?