They’ve been making wine for thousands of years in this Black Sea country – and now it’s at the forefront of a renaissance in traditional methods
The qvevri is inescapable in Georgia. Depictions of this traditional, earthenware winemaking vessel, on T-shirts, tea towels and fridge magnets, fill the tourist shops in the spruced-up centre of the capital, Tbilisi. They’re also a feature of roadside billboards and the signs of small-town cafes, bars and hotels with rows of the real things the prize exhibit in any winery tour.
The qvevri’s ubiquity is more than quaint tourist-board marketing. It’s a symbol of just how proud the Georgians are of being the oldest winemaking country in the world: in November last year, archaeologists on a dig south of Tbilisi uncovered fragments of qvevri with residual wine compounds dating back 8,000 years.
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