Georgia holds more than 500 indigenous grape varieties – roughly one-sixth of the world's total – preserved in part through a national grape collection at Jighaura, north of Tbilisi. Two of them do most of the country's work abroad: Rkatsiteli, the most widely planted white in Georgia and one of the leading grapes across the Caucasus and Eastern Europe; and Saperavi, one of the few teinturier grapes in the world – red flesh as well as red skin – producing wines of depth that age for decades, with complexity rivalling Nebbiolo. Both are Kakhetian by origin. Both find some of their finest expression in the valley our estate looks across.

  The qvevri is, in the end, a vessel – clay, egg-shaped, buried to its neck in the earth. It is not, on its own, what gives Georgian amber wine its character. Those qualities are produced by a method that surrounds the vessel: the condition of the grapes at picking, the timing of the crush, the proportion of skins and stems, the duration of contact, the moment of separation. The clay holds the wine. It does not make it.

  Vine Era is built on that distinction. We have taken the full Kakhetian methodology and rebuilt it in modern equipment – steel cisterns, contemporary production lines, monitored temperature and