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Alcoholic drinks from Georgia, including Kakheti and Imereti

Qvevri wine (Georgian buried-amphora wine)ქვევრი

Qvevri wine is Georgian wine fermented and aged in large egg-shaped clay jars buried in the ground. The juice goes in with its skins, seeds and often stems (the chacha), ferments open for 10 to 20 days while the cap is pushed down, and is then sealed for months. The long skin contact gives even white qvevri wines several times the phenols of whites made the European way.

Fully documentedAlcoholic drinks5.3 months – 6.7 monthsFamily: Red wine

Recipe

No fixed amounts recordedNo fixed recipe. The qvevri is filled to about 80–85 % with juice and chacha; the share of chacha depends on the regional style.
Grape juice with its chacha (skins, seeds and stalks)Up to 100 % of the chacha in the Kakhetian style; 2.5–3.0 % in the Imeretian style[vigentini2016][mittova2026]
No added yeast or sulphur dioxideIn the family cellars surveyed, neither commercial cultures nor sulphur dioxide were used[vigentini2016]
Starterspontaneous

Total time across the recorded steps: 5.3 months – 6.7 months

Start
Drag the bar or press Play

What changes: Grapes are trodden and the juice and skins run into the buried jar

Step 1 of 4
Tread the grapes and run them into the qvevri
Time
Not documented
Temperature
Not documented
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented
Which microbes the steps name, step by step
Yeasts
Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Grapes are crushed by treading in the wooden press. Output: juice with skins, seeds and stalks.

Flavour
Not documented
Texture
Not documented
Colour
Not documented

Microbes at work in this step

Not documented for this step.

Method

Measured measured in a studySet fixed by a specification or tested recipeReported one source reports itTypical a general value, not sourced for this fermentUnconfirmed not yet checked against a source

At a glance

Qvevri wine is Georgian wine fermented and aged in large egg-shaped clay jars buried in the ground. The juice goes in with its skins, seeds and often stems (the chacha), ferments open for 10 to 20 days while the cap is pushed down, and is then sealed for months. The long skin contact gives even white qvevri wines several times the phenols of whites made the European way. Made in 4 steps over 5.3 months – 6.7 months. The longest step, seal and mature on the chacha, takes 5–6 months (Ieri F 2021) and runs at 12–14 °C (Kostecka-Gugała A 2026). Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the most common yeast in Georgian wines does most of the fermenting.

Key numbers
Main step5–6 monthsReported[ieri2021]Seal and mature on the chacha
Temperature12–14 °CReported[kostecka2026]Seal and mature on the chacha

What makes this one different

The wine ferments and ages in a clay jar buried to its neck, not in a tank or barrel, and stays on its skins, seeds and often stems for months. That makes white qvevri wine closer to a red wine in tannin and colour.

Related ferments

Variants

  • Kakhetian styleFermented with up to 100 % of the chacha. Qvevri whites made on their solids can turn from light golden to dark amber as they age.
  • Imeretian styleOnly 2.5–3.0 % of the chacha is added.
  • European styleMade in qvevri with no chacha at all.

Made the qvevri wine way

Safety

Wine faults are the main risk. In a 2019 tasting of 575 small-producer wines in Georgia, 30 % were rejected, mostly for mice flavour, oxidation and high volatile acidity. Qvevri wines had fewer microbial faults than other wines, but a musty or mouldy fault was far commoner in them (19 % against 1 %), which the authors link to how hard qvevri are to sanitise. Cellars sometimes fumigate an empty qvevri with sulphur dioxide to disinfect it before filling. A study of 72 qvevri wines found that spontaneous malolactic fermentation can leave more histamine in the wine than a fermentation started with a commercial Oenococcus oeni culture.

Hazards the sources name: Histamine, formed by lactic acid bacteria during spontaneous malolactic fermentation in some qvevri wines (abstract only); Spoilage microbes that cause wine faults (acetic acid bacteria and volatile acidity, Brettanomyces, mouldy or musty taint) when qvevri are not well sanitised.

History and sources

Every number is labelled with how it is known. How this atlas is made

Egg-shaped clay vessels found at the Shulaveri sites near Tbilisi gave chemical evidence of grapes dating to 6000–5800 BC, according to a 2022 Georgian review. Under the Soviet system Georgian winemaking turned to mass production and lost some of the traditional values of qvevri winemaking. After independence in the early 1990s Georgia adopted protected designations of origin and the Law on Vine and Wine (1998). Qvevri winemaking was given Georgian national intangible heritage status and inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2013.

  1. [ieri2021] Ieri F., Campo M., Cassiani C., Urciuoli S., Jurkhadze K., Romani A. 2021, Analysis of aroma and polyphenolic compounds in Saperavi red wine vinified in Qvevri, Food Science & Nutrition 9(12):6492–6500paper
  2. [mittova2026] Mittova V., Tsetskhladze Z.R., Motsonelidze N. et al. 2026, Georgian grapes and wines as a source of phenolic compounds: composition, antioxidant activity, and traditional winemaking, Molecules 31(2):303paper
  3. [vigentini2016] Vigentini I., Maghradze D., Petrozziello M., Bonello F. et al. 2016, Indigenous Georgian wine-associated yeasts and grape cultivars to edit the wine quality in a precision oenology perspective, Frontiers in Microbiology 7:352paper
  4. [vlasov2022] Vlasov A., Chichua D., Didebulidze K. 2022, The monitoring of wine faults in Georgian wines, Annals of Agrarian Science 20, pp. 46–59paper
  5. [vlasov2024] Vlasov A., Vogtmann M., Chichua D., Didebulidze K., Gujabidze A., Schneider V. 2024, Histamine contents in Georgian qvevri wines with different wine faults, Wine Studies 3, doi:10.4081/ws.12910 (abstract)paper
  6. [kostecka2026] Kostecka-Gugała A., Stanula J., Żuchowski J., Kaszycki P. 2026, Optimizing wine production from hybrid cultivars, impact of grape maceration time on the content of bioactive compounds, Molecules 31:179, doi:10.3390/molecules31010179paper