8,000 Years in Clay

Patrick McGovern has one of the stranger job titles in academia. He's an archaeochemist. His specialty is figuring out what ancient people were drinking by analyzing what got left behind in their vessels. Chemical residue. The molecular memory of liquids that evaporated thousands of years ago.

In 2017, his team published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about two Neolithic villages in the Republic of Georgia. Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, about fifty kilometers south of Tbilisi. The excavations had been running for years — a joint project between the Georgian National Museum and the University of Toronto. They'd been pulling pottery fragments out of the floors of 8,000-year-old mud-brick houses and sending them to McGovern's lab.

What they found was tartaric acid.

Here's why that matters. Tartaric acid occurs in high concentrations in the Eurasian grape and almost nothing else. And unlike a lot of organic compounds, it doesn't break down over time. It doesn't transform into something unrecognizable after eight millennia in the earth. It just sits there, stable, waiting to be found. When McGovern finds tartaric acid in an ancient vessel, that's not circumstantial evidence of grape use. That's wine.

And the pottery at these sites dated to 6000 to 5800 BCE.

Before this discovery, the oldest confirmed wine in the world came from Hajji Firuz Tepe in northwestern Iran — 5400 to 5000 BCE. The Georgian evidence pushed the clock back somewhere between six hundred and a thousand years. People in the South Caucasus were making wine three thousand years before anyone invented writing. Five thousand years before the Iron Age.

And then there's one more thing.

One of the large jars from Gadachrili Gora has decoration on the outside. Raised figures in the clay. People, under what appears to be a trellis of grapevines, dancing.

The chemistry says wine was made here. The art says it was worth celebrating.

Whatever wine meant to these people — ritual, sustenance, community — it meant enough that they put images of themselves enjoying it on the vessels they made it in.

That was 8,000 years ago. In the Georgian highlands today, winemakers are still fermenting their grapes in large clay vessels buried in the earth. Vessels that look almost identical to what McGovern's team pulled from the soil at Gadachrili Gora.

Before we move on, I want to thank Teona from Views Georgia Tours for the assistance with Georgian pronunciation. Find her on Instagram at @viewsgeorgiatours.

The vessel is called a qvevri. It has been made and used in Georgia for 8,000 years, which is probably why its name doesn't fit comfortably into any alphabet other than Georgia's own. The shape is what matters.

Qvevri are egg-shaped. Wide at the shoulders, narrowing down to a pointed bottom, and no handles. The wide mouth at the top gets sealed during fermentation. The first time you see one — or a photograph of one — you might think the shape is decorative. There's something about the elegance of it, the particular proportion of the curve. But every single feature of a qvevri's geometry is functional, and those functions were figured out by people working in the Neolithic period, thousands of years before anyone had the language to explain the physics they were responding to.

The egg shape helps the grape solids — the skins, seeds, and stems, which Georgians call the chacha — circulate naturally during fermentation. The pointed bottom means sediment collects cleanly so the wine clarifies on its own. The size — most working qvevri hold somewhere between 800 and 2,000 liters, with 1,000 to 1,200 considered the sweet spot — creates just the right internal volume for the fermentation environment to develop the way you want it to. A person can fit inside the largest ones, which is relevant because that's how you clean them.

Qvevri are made by hand. Master potters in specific Georgian villages — Makatubani, Shrosha, others in Imereti and Kakheti — coil ropes of local clay into the vessel's form over weeks or months, working without a wheel, building the shape from the bottom up. After the clay dries, into the kiln it goes for seven or eight days at high temperature. Then, while it's still warm, the interior gets coated with beeswax. The wax creates a hygienic surface that prevents bacteria from colonizing the porous clay, while still letting the vessel breathe just enough. We'll come back to why that matters.

And then the qvevri goes completely into the ground — not stored near a cool wall, not set beside it. Buried, with only the rim visible above the floor of the marani — the wine cellar. In a traditional Georgian winery, the floor is tiled or graveled around the exposed rims of dozens of qvevri, each one planted in the earth like a seed. The first time you walk into one of these cellars, it looks like the floor is full of wells.

The reason for the burial is temperature, and this is where something genuinely elegant is happening. At the depth where a qvevri sits, the ground holds at a steady 12 to 15 degrees Celsius. Not approximately. Consistently, year-round, regardless of what's happening above ground. Fermentation generates heat, and if you let fermentation run too warm, you get volatile acidity, off-flavors, a wine that rushed to the finish and brought nothing interesting with it. The earth doesn't refrigerate the qvevri. It stabilizes it. The Neolithic winemakers at Gadachrili Gora almost certainly discovered this by accident — buried the vessels, noticed the wine came out better, buried them deeper. What we now build temperature-controlled cellars and industrial refrigeration systems to achieve, the earth does for free.

The clay does its own work too. The beeswax manages most of the wine's interaction with the vessel wall, but the clay itself is slightly porous. Just enough for a microscopic exchange of oxygen — what winemakers call micro-oxygenation. The same process that makes barrel aging valuable, but without oak flavor. The wine evolves slowly, building structure, without being exposed to the oxidation that would strip it of freshness. And over many vintages, the inner pores of the qvevri develop something remarkable: a biofilm. Indigenous yeasts and bacteria that have established themselves in the clay over years of use. A living ecosystem specific to that vessel, that cellar, that winery. Winemakers who've worked with the same qvevri for decades describe them as having personalities. The chemistry backs that up.

So what actually happens inside one?

In the Kakhetian method — Kakheti is the dominant wine region in eastern Georgia, responsible for about eighty percent of the country's wine production — the grapes go into the qvevri complete. Juice, skins, seeds, stems. The whole harvest. The vessel gets sealed. Wild yeasts naturally present on the grape skins kick off fermentation. And then it proceeds, slowly, in the cool dark of the earth, for five to six months. Sometimes longer.

That whole time, the wine is in continuous contact with the chacha. And that contact is where things get really interesting.

Grape skins are full of compounds that conventional white winemaking goes out of its way to exclude. Phenolics, tannins, terpenes — the aromatic and structural molecules that give the grape variety its character. In standard white wine production, the skins come off almost immediately after crushing. The goal is clean, bright, fruit-forward, light. The skins are the problem to be eliminated, but in the Kakhetian method, the skins are the whole point.

As fermentation proceeds and alcohol builds, it acts as a solvent, pulling compounds out of the chacha into the wine. The tannins — the same structural molecules that give red wine its grip and aging potential — migrate from skins and seeds into the juice. Terpenes, the volatile aromatic molecules responsible for floral and citrus character, are released gradually in the stable environment the buried qvevri provides. The color transforms. The juice starts pale yellow and moves through gold toward deep amber and copper, driven by phenolic extraction and the slow oxidation the clay walls allow.

By the time the wine is drawn off after five or six months, it looks nothing like a white wine. It's amber. Sometimes dark amber, almost copper. It has real tannins. And those tannins do something important: they protect the wine. The phenolic compounds bind with oxygen, guarding the aromatic molecules. They stabilize the wine chemically in ways that mean sulfite additions aren't usually needed until bottling, if then. The wine, quite literally, takes care of itself.

This is the Imeretian contrast — western Georgia, cooler climate, shorter maceration of two to three months, only a fraction of the chacha included, stems left out. Less tannic, more aromatic, closer to what a European palate would recognize as white wine. Still fundamentally different from anything made without skin contact. Two regional approaches, one underlying philosophy: time, in contact with the earth, doing the work.

Under Soviet rule, the qvevri nearly disappeared.

When Georgia was absorbed into the Soviet Union in 1921, the priorities of Soviet agricultural planning were not compatible with 8,000 years of tradition. The state needed volume. Consistency. Wine that could be produced at industrial scale, bottled efficiently, distributed across a vast internal market that ran on centralized logistics. Qvevri were replaced with stainless steel tanks. Family vineyards were collectivized. And Georgia's indigenous grape varieties — roughly 500 of them, more than almost any country on earth — were largely uprooted and replaced with a handful of high-yield cultivars that were easy to manage and easy to bottle. The wine the system produced was, by most accounts, sweet and unremarkable by design. Volume over everything.

But the qvevri didn't disappear. It went inside. Families kept making wine in their homes the way their grandparents had, because that was how wine was made, and no agricultural directive from Moscow was going to change that. The knowledge wasn't catalogued or archived. It was lived. It passed from hand to hand across seventy years of Soviet rule, and when the USSR collapsed in 1991, it was still there, intact.

The post-Soviet revival of qvevri winemaking is not a reinvention. It's a resurrection of something that never actually died.

In 2004, a British wine merchant named David Harvey was working in Sicily, in the cellar of a winemaker named Frank Cornelissen on the slopes of Mount Etna. He was tasting through a range of white wines — wines from Radikon, Gravner, Dario Princic, and others — that had been fermented on their skins for weeks or months. Amber-colored. Tannic. Completely unlike anything the existing wine categories could accommodate. There was no name for what he was drinking, so he came up with one. He called it orange wine.

Harvey worked for Raeburn Fine Wines in London, and his concern was practical: without a name, these wines were going to face rejection in restaurants and wine shops that had no framework to place them. Orange was accurate enough as a color reference. It was simple, so it stuck. David Harvey is the reason this category has a name.

What he was naming, though, wasn't new, at all.

What he was naming was the oldest method of making white wine in the world — a method Georgia had been using continuously for 8,000 years and had never abandoned. There's a Georgian word for it: karvisperi ghvino. Amber wine. The poet Sandro Shanshiashvili used it in 1920. Georgia had a name for this wine a century before the West needed one.

The West forgot, but Georgia didn't, and that's the whole story.

Now let's talk about two men who remembered.

Josko Gravner farms in Oslavia, in the extreme northeastern corner of Italy, a few meters from the Slovenian border. In the 1980s he was one of the most acclaimed winemakers in Italy. Stainless steel tanks, French barriques, international critics falling over themselves, top ratings from Gambero Rosso. And he was miserable making those wines. Technically correct. Commercially successful. To him, they tasted like modern enology — not like the hills his family had farmed for generations.

He started working backward. In 1996, hail destroyed most of his harvest, leaving him with only a small quantity of Ribolla Gialla — a local white grape with thick skins and notoriously neutral flavor when made conventionally. He had nothing to lose, so he tried something different: he fermented it on the skins in an old wooden vat, wild yeasts, no temperature control, no intervention. What came out stopped him cold. By 1997, his entire white wine production had switched to skin contact.

But he knew he was still missing something. He'd read about qvevri in Pliny the Elder. He'd met Georgian refugees in Slovenia who told him more. He applied for a visa to visit Georgia. It took two years to obtain. He arrived in 2000 to find a qvevri maker and place an order. At the time, only monasteries had functioning wine cellars — he wasn't there to meet winemakers. He found the makers. He ordered eleven large vessels. Nine arrived broken, in November. The 2001 vintage was the first Gravner wine fully fermented in Georgian clay. His reds followed in 2006. He now has 47 qvevri buried in his cellar. He ages his wines a minimum of seven years before release. He doesn't call them orange wines. He calls them amber wines. The same word as Georgia.

Stanko Radikon farmed just down the road in Oslavia. Same village, completely different path to the same destination. His question was simpler: why does Ribolla Gialla — a grape with skins so thick they jammed the old screw presses — make such a flat, lifeless wine when those skins get removed? In 1995 he started leaving them in. By 1997 his whole production had switched. He never used qvevri — his instrument was large neutral oak barrels, long maceration, and an almost fierce commitment to zero added sulfur. He died of cancer on September 11, 2016, just before the harvest he'd spent the summer preparing for. His son Saša continues the work.

Neither of these men was chasing a trend. There was no trend. The natural wine movement barely existed. Orange wine didn't have a name yet. Gravner was dismissed by the critics who used to love him. Radikon lost customers. Both of them kept going, because the question they were following was more interesting than the commercial consequences of following it.

What would this grape taste like if we stopped removing the skins? What does white wine actually taste like when you make it the way Georgia always has?

The answer was: something worth making.

Georgia has approximately 500 indigenous grape varieties.

France, for comparison, has around 250. And France is considered one of the most viticulturally diverse countries in the world. Georgia's 500 exist across a landscape roughly the size of West Virginia, at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, in a geography of mountains and valleys and microclimates so varied that grapes grown forty kilometers apart can produce almost unrecognizably different wine. Most of those 500 varieties aren't commercially produced. Some exist in single plots, tended by a single family who never stopped growing them. Some were recovered by researchers who spent the post-Soviet years combing through monastery vineyards and genetic archives, rescuing what the Soviet period had failed to completely destroy.

That number isn't a marketing statistic. It's the material evidence of 8,000 years of unbroken cultivation in one place. Every variety is a decision someone made and passed down.

Georgia now exports more than 100 million bottles a year to 64 countries. Its largest single market is Russia — 63.8% of total exports as of 2022. This is a vulnerability the Georgians are well aware of. Russia banned Georgian wine entirely from 2006 to 2013, during a period of political tension, and the threat of another embargo is never entirely off the table. The Georgian National Wine Agency now runs formal promotion programs targeting the US, UK, Germany, Poland, the Baltic states, China, South Korea, and Japan. Georgia is using an 8,000-year-old product to build its way out of economic dependency on a country that has repeatedly demonstrated willingness to weaponize trade.

In the villages where qvevri are still made — Makatubani, Shrosha, and others — the craft hasn't mechanized. The clay is still coiled by hand over weeks or months. The beeswax still goes on warm after firing, applied by someone who learned the technique from someone who learned it before them, in an unbroken chain of transmission that stretches further back than anyone can name. The vessels at the end of this process aren't reproductions or museum pieces. They're the same object — as near as archaeology can determine — as the ones McGovern's team found embedded in the floors of houses at Gadachrili Gora.

Karvisperi ghvino. Amber wine. Josko Gravner uses that word too. It's not a coincidence — he traced the practice back to its origin, ordered vessels from the same region, buried them in Italian earth, and arrived at the same vocabulary the Georgians have been using for centuries.

Time is the active ingredient. Not as a concept or a metaphor — as a literal participant in the process. The earth holds the temperature stable. The clay and the chacha handle the rest. The winemaker buries the qvevri and waits. Gravner waits seven years. The process genuinely requires that duration to complete itself.

Eight thousand years of evidence suggests he's right.

We don't know what they called it, what it tasted like, or what it meant to them. We can't be sure whether they drank it at planting or harvest or burial or birth or something we'd have no name for. What we do know is the chemistry, and the vessel. We know that the vessel they used — buried in the earth, sealed with clay, lined with beeswax — is still being made today in the same country, by people who never stopped.

Some things survive not because they are preserved, but because they work.

DISTILLATE is a production of The Alchemist's Bar — part of the Obscura Meridian family of projects. New episodes every Tuesday at 6:00 AM Central.