WTN: Kisi from Kakheti, Georgia

Tbilvino Qvevris Kisi 2016 - Kakheti, Georgia; 12,5% abv; c.18€; 100% Kisi
Kisi is a grape variety that I think I've only tried once before though it is a variety that many Georgian wineries regard highly. This is gloriously floral for an orange wine. Sometimes orange wines can be a bit same-y with similar aromas and textures no matter what region or variety they're made from. But this really has a unique profile while still having all those features some of us want from orange wine. Apart from those floral fireworks this has really attractive apricot and red tea (reminds me of Yunnan dianhong) aromas - oh my goodness, this is like literally all my favourite aromas in a single wine!

Proper tannic bite here - this isn't the most austere orange wine out there, but you do need to appreciate this genre to get any pleasure out of this wine. This isn't one I'd introduce people to orange wine with nor is it one I'd try to convert skeptics with. But to me, since I love orange wine, it is just lovely. This is just the type of austerity and tannic bite that I like in reds and to me it works brilliantly in orange wine also. But it's a friendly rather than painful type of austerity since there is a glimmer of fruit there. But not properly friendly as that wouldn't be orange wine then.

Buy again? Oh yes! Often! For under 20€ this is great quality and huge personality - if one appreciates orange wine. And I love orange wine though it sometimes seems to be trendy to poopoo it on wine fora.

I see absolutely no reason why orange wine should not show as much variety as red, white and rosé. One just needs more tasting experience of orange wine to appreciate the variety, and that is difficult to get in "western" markets.

Fair enough if you decide you generally don't like it - generally speaking I don't like rosé - but that does not mean we need to be poopooers.

(Nice TN BTW)

Georgian wines are having a Renaissance in Israel the last couple of years. A few years ago, a young woman went to culinary school in Italy and wound up travelling in Georgia and fell in love with the wines. She comes back to Israel and starts a small import boutique specializing in mostly natural wines from Georgia.

She then made an inadvertent tactical mistake. She was sort of misquoted in a local interview as being a pioneer importer of natural and organic wines. That drew the wrath of another boutique importer, a rather feisty, blood and money thirsty pair, who actually had been importing natural wines for a bit. In one of those strange, inexplicable coincidences this importer went the full monty in Georgian imports shortly after the interview. Currently, it feels like more Georgian wineries are imported to Israel than classified Bordeaux growths.

The Georgian people still don't know what hit them but they're not looking this gift horse in the mouth.

Good grief! I hate that companies often focus on taking out the opposition, without considering that if they collaborated they could grow the market to mutual advantage.

The Georgians who make natural qvevri wine in minute quantities all seem to regard themselves as playing for the same team, so it is sad when their importers don't.

(That's assuming that they are selling such wines. Saina's wine actually comes from a large scale producer - now privately owned, but it used to be one of the few Soviet goddamn-awful wine factories in the country. And although the wine has seen the inside of a qvevri at some point I doubt it has any "natural" credentials. I am not meaning to criticise the wine, or the producer in its present incarnation, but we need to recognise things for what they are.)