One of the most innovative wine projects in the world, bringing together British former award-winning critic and wine competition organiser, Robert Joseph, and leading Georgian winemaker, Vladimer Kublashvili.

This ambitious project began in 2018 with Joseph and Kublashvili setting out to discover how special a wine they could produce in Georgia when unconstrained by conventional rules. This included exploring novel blends of  grape varieties - mostly local, but possibly including the occasional outsider - from wide range of very varied regions .,

Some of the juice - from exclusively handpicked grapes - would be fermented in traditional qvevri amphora; but stainless steel and subtle, second-year, oak would have a role too.

When experimenting with the red and then the rosé, it was discovered that air-drying the rare Aladasturi grapes for 10 days was advantageous. But so, crucially, for the red and white, was blending 15 or more wines from across as many as six harvests - like a top class multi-vintage Champagne or Vega Sicilia Unico Reserva Especial.
 

Unlike most winemaking nations, Georgia has only tiny plantings of  so-called ‘international’ grape varieties, despite the fact that Prince Alexander Chavchavadze, the soldier and poet who is celebrated as the father of the country’s modern wine industry, planted Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec and Pinot Noir over two centuries ago.

What Georgia does have is  an extraordinary range of over 500 indigenous varieties, only two of which - Saperavi and Rkatsiteli - are found elsewhere.  During the Soviet era, most of these grapes were more or less abandoned by the collectivised wineries but fortunately most survived thanks to the Georgian tradition of families making wine for their own consumption.  Over the last decade, there has been a huge effort by winemakers like Vladimer Kublashvili to find, identify and replant these varieties - and to learn what they can do best. Some, for example, seem to benefit more from vinification in qvevri than others.

While wanting to create an emphatically ‘Georgian’ wine , we make no apology for including a little Aligoté and Muscat in  the white blend. Together, they represent roughly 4.5% in the 2022 White Assemblage, and totally justified their presence. Making the best wine we could was far more important than respecting any kind of rule that imposes regional ‘purity’. Similarly, the red 2022 and 2023 Assemblages unashamedly have a little - 5% - Merlot.

Many producers in countries with interesting autochthonous varieties nowadays have a similar view, but prefer to not to mention their use of small amounts of ‘international’ varieties - burying them in the15% of legally permitted ‘other grapes’ . We preferred to be open about precisely what goes into K’AVSHIRI.