Fun with Skin Contact What's Old Is New Again with Orange Wine

Class transcript:

Welcome, everyone! Welcome one and all. We are thrilled to have you all with us. Welcome, welcome, happy Sunday to you! Uh, it is... formerly Stay Home Wine School. We are all still staying home; it should be said. But um, we have uh rebranded, pivoted. Uh, we are now Tug Wine School, albeit out of our studio at Revelers Hour. So, all the cross-promotion here uh, we're going to be really shameless about it for the sake of the solvency of both businesses. Um, but we are thrilled to have new digs. My wife is particularly thrilled uh, that I am no longer um monopolizing the basement uh, for a couple hours uh, every Sunday. I doubt she's watching. But if she is, I love you, Meredith, and Beady.

Um, at any rate, um, thank you one and all for joining us. Um, I will give you a studio tour, uh, of our new digs, uh, very shortly, I promise. Um, for the time being, for the sake of, uh, provisioning today, uh, it is desperately easy. Um, the provisioning instructions are: find an orange wine; better yet, find two orange wines and drink them. That's it. Thank you to everyone who used uh our online store and uh, the newly reopened uh tail up goat uh delivery and takeout uh as the source uh for your orange wines to the bottles uh that we were selling uh, for the sake of our kits uh right here and we'll talk. Through those, uh, today, um, thank you, uh, as well to the folks who are participating, uh, remotely.

It is and remains the highlight of my week uh getting emails from folks in far-flung locations. And I'll see you next week, big ups to my cousin Annie Bear and her husband Jared and her family if they made it on already I love you guys. Big ups to Giselle in British Columbia, my favorite Canadian province; I didn't even know we had listeners in British Columbia very exciting! It's one o'clock in British Columbia, so Giselle, get your brunch, wine, drink on, girl, and make it orange wine good for you. At any rate, welcome one. all uh this is uh a brave new era for us as uh businesses and uh a brave new era uh for the sake of wine school you know obviously continuity

um in the host and uh with me as always one uh sarah thompson um to help moderate this forum and i promise i will remember uh to unmute her um at the appropriate juncture um so that she can actually um you know speak uh when i call upon her um to help me with the chat keep the hashtag excellent for wine questions coming uh throughout the discourse uh we also have a very special guest uh coming uh the gentleman who brings us um both of these wines uh he is running a little late to the chat um because he is at his son's virtual um recital at the moment which is just adorable and uh speaks to uh again uh the crazy world uh that we are uh living in i'm gonna give you all a couple more moments to join us here um out of scandalous betrayal and against me dude sounds awful let's get down to it quality. Georgian culture, you know, it's like a solid, you know, 30 minutes behind everybody else, you know, but you know they're going to have fun once they get there. So, you know, we don't worry about these things, and hopefully you all have opened your wines and started to enjoy them already. Please do not wait for us to do so. Once again, welcome one and all. Noel Brockett is in the mix, and we are thrilled to have him. Noel, say hi to everybody. You're unmuted, buddy. You should be unmuted, Noel. We'll try it one more time. It wouldn't be. Okay, there you go. Victory. Yes! Yes, Jordan. This is very exciting. So, we placed a special request for Noel to appear in his traditional Georgian dress.

This is a choke. How was the recital, buddy? It was good. It was, well, it was a master class, so we got master class. I'm glad to hear it. So, welcome, Noel. Welcome, everyone. Let's kick this class off in style. Sarah, say hi to all the people. Hello. Ah, great. Nailed that transition. Beautiful. Hopefully, this will continue to go smoothly as we go forward. So, welcome one and all. Lesson number eight. I can't believe it's been eight weeks already, four upon. We are in the midst of an amber revolution here, so orange wines to kick things off. A lot of subtitles for this one. Fun with skin contact, Urwine. What's old is new again. Back to the future. Orange wine, fascinating subject, and this was definitely our most requested topic for a class.

And, as such, I wanted to make sure we reserved it for a special occasion, the special occasion being the phoenix-like rebirth of both Tail Up Goat and Reveler's Hour. So for those of you who were not here a little earlier, this is Tail Up Goat Wine School. We are broadcasting from our satellite Reveler's Hour studio. I have a little screen share just to give you a sense of what that looks like. This is a little horrifying and sinister. So this is me in the window at Reveler's Hour in our studio that doubles as a terrarium for all the plants that, you know, were formerly in the restaurant and that my co-owner and business partner Jill continues to lovingly sustain throughout the pandemic. Just for a bit of shameless self-promotion, just bear with me.

Wine School, as always, is free. I want to emphasize that. If you are in a position to give and you feel like paying for this service, we encourage donations to our community partner, Miriam's Kitchen. They're doing amazing work to address the needs of one of the most vulnerable communities in our city, the homeless community, throughout this crisis. We have supported them and worked with them for all the four years that we've been in business, and we want to continue to do so at this, their hour of need. We are thrilled to be reopened, not only at Tail Up Goat, where you all could have purchased the these wines this week, but also at Reveler's Hour, where I am broadcasting. Just a quick note that we are selling dinners ready to reheat out of Reveler's Hour.

You have until 5 o'clock to buy them for purchase and pickup and delivery within a 10-mile radius tomorrow. So you've got an hour if you want dinner tomorrow through the Reveler's Hour website. A shout-out to the local wine and beverage department - I am happy to be here with you guys. So, thank you to you all once again who took advantage of the Tail Up Goat wine store. I spent the bulk of my week working on that website. I hope you enjoyed the experience of purchasing through it, and thank you all so much for your patience with us while we were in beta. I want to give you a little studio tour here because we are in beautiful Adams Morgan.

If you've had a bit of wine already, maybe close your eyes because this is gonna be, you know, not the steadiest camera in the world, but you can see the beautiful Lyon Hotel there. Hopefully it doesn't go belly up for the sake of this crisis. And then panning over, you can see that I, efforts of my colleague James who directed this beautiful curtain. You can see Rev. LeZauer in the background, but I'm not wearing a mask because I am sealed off from the space there. Without further ado, let's get to the topic at hand here, which is orange wines. A bit of verse, as always, to kick off proceedings here. And that is actually courtesy this week of our guest, Noel Brockett. So this is from a Georgian poet, the most widely known Georgian poet, Galaktion Tabidzian.

This is as translated by Noel and his wife. It's called Without Love. Without love, the sun does not rain over the arch of the sky. The wind does not blow. The forest does not tremble for joy. Without love, there does not exist beauty. Neither immortality exists without love. But altogether different is the final love. As the flower of autumn often bests the spring, it does not call out for passions, stormy and aimless. Neither for youthful vigor nor wild voices does it call. And having been raised in the crisp autumn valley, it does not at all resemble the gentle flowers of spring. Instead of the gentle breeze, it is caressed by the storm. And instead of desire, it calls out for the embrace of the infinite. So big ups.

There's a strong tradition of Georgian poetry from the Middle Ages on forward. Our guest and resident Georgian wine expert, Noel Brockett, is himself a lover of literature and a Renaissance man. And we are thrilled to have him with us. And let's begin. Let's pivot to orange wine here. So it should be said that, you know, orange wine is at once ancient and a bit avant-garde and new. The term itself, and this is a quote from Simon Wolfe, who wrote a recent book called The Amber Revolution, which I highly recommend if you're in the mood for a bit of wine. He says that orange wine as a term is troublesome enough that immediate clarification is necessary. And I think that's, you know, I think that's, you know, I think that's very true of the term.

A lot of people don't like the term orange wine. I think orange has some unfortunate associations, especially at the modern moment. This is what I think of sadly, when I think orange. And, you know, that is not a pleasant image for any of us right now. Should be said that Georgians themselves do not refer to their wines as orange. They would say amber, as would some of the masters of the other cultures. And that's true of the corners of the world that makes some of the greatest orange wines. You know, they prefer the term amber. And I think amber, you know, it's a little more poetic than orange. But that said, the category is defined by a species of wine, a genre of wines that are made from white grapes.

So you start with white grapes, but you leave the grapes in contact with the skins, which is to say that you make wine from white grapes like you would a red wine. It should be noted that red wines themselves derive their color, from pigments in the skins of those grapes. So they are only red to begin with because the juice is left in contact with the skins which bear those pigments during fermentation process. Typically, white wine is made without that skin contact because the white skins have no pigment to offer. But in the case of orange wine, they leave the skins in the mix. And what you pick up varies depending on whether you leave the juice in contact with the skins from your hours or whether you leave it in contact with skins for days or weeks.

And I know a lot of you, when you start these lessons, you are wondering, what should I drink first? Now, I would say typically, you want to start with a lighter wine. So in my case, that would be the Chinuri, which sees a little less skin contact. It comes from a thinner-skinned Georgian varietal. And then I would move on to the darker, denser Spani thereafter, which comes from a region that is much warmer in Caheti and produces wines that have some more kind of wholesome toothsomeness about them, much like you would drink white wine before red. In a perfect ,, you would drink a lighter, fresher orange wine before a more robust one. Now, for the sake of our tasting exercise, we're going to flip the script there.

And we're actually going to start with the Cahetian wine, just because Caheti produces the bulk of wine in Georgia. And it will be a useful archetype. And the winemaker plays such a huge role in the modern story of Georgian wine. And Noel will give you a further sense of that once he's in the mix. But just to kind of go over the broad, broad genre itself, to tell the story of orange wine properly, we must kind of begin at the beginning of wine itself. I'm going to share with you one of my favorite wine maps. And yes, I have favorite wine maps. This is in Spanish, actually. But it considers the origins of wine itself. So you can see the region between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea here.

And this encompasses the Caucasus. This is a crossroads of civilization. It is the western terminus of the Silk Road coming from China. It is the easternmost limit of the Mediterranean. It is the gateway to the Middle East and Asia for Russia, and vice versa. It is the gateway to Russia coming from the Middle East. So you're really at this axis of civilization here. And in the midst, you have several different republics and all sorts of different language groups. The one we're going to consider today is Georgia. And Georgia is a republic named after the same state as the US state. But in this case, we're dealing with Mother Georgia, the origin of fine wine as we know it.

And all wine, we drink almost all wine, all fine wine, comes from one species of grape called Vitis vinifera, which was first domesticated in the region encompassing Georgia roughly 8,000 years ago, so in 6,000 BC. And some of the first evidence of winemaking comes from archaeological sites in Georgia, Armenia, Persia, modern-day Iran, that date roughly to 6,000 before a common era. The Georgians like to say that they are going on 8,000 vintages strong. And there is this wonderful continuity for the sake of their winemaking history from the ancient through to the modern. And that's something that we're going to talk over with Noel as we taste through the Georgian wines that we have with me today. But I'm going to save that conversation about Georgia and its very unique history for our dialogue with Noel.

I'm going to consider briefly how Georgian wine and how amber wine, orange wine, has kind of come back into the fold. And that story is a very new one. That has to do with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. So a lot of the places where a tradition of aging wine from white grapes on the skins emerged intact into the modern world. It's a very ancient notion, it should be said, that Georgians have been making wine from white grapes on the skins from the beginning of their winemaking through to the modern era. They never stopped making white wine that way. They didn't kind of bow to the fads of the 17th century, the 19th century. They've been consistently making orange wine. They've been making wine for 8,000 years, it should be said.

It's just the fact that the world is kind of finally coming around to the way that they do so. And the real seminal figure for the sake of our modern appreciation of skin contact wine, orange wine, is Slovenian. Slovenia is another corner of the world that has a strong tradition of making wine from white grapes onto the skins. And the seminal figure in Slovenia is Josko Grafner. Josko was born shortly after World War II. Slovenia has some of the same tragic historical patterns as Georgia. It traded hands throughout the 20th century. It was crippled under the Soviet Union. It's proud local, regional, national cultures were subverted by the Soviets. Winemaking is built into their way of life. And Grafner comes from a country with a culturally Slovenian family, but they are in Italy.

The border was very much arbitrarily defined after World War II. He has vineyards. His family had vineyards on both sides of the border after World War II. It's said that the border was defined in such a way that there were people who had to cross a border station to use their outhouses. There's no kind of beginning and end for the sake of vineyards between Italy and Slovenia. And Josko Grafner came from a winemaking background. His father made wine. He took over. He took over the winemaking in the 70s going into the 80s. And he made wine in a very modern style. He made wine using new French oak. He made wine at scale. He very much fell into the post-war fads of the era. But then he had a bit of a road to Damascus moment.

And he traveled the world. And he fell out of love with more modern styles of wine. And he recognized the ways in which they had become more ubiquitous, the ways in which they had become monotonous. Across category, regardless of where they were from. And he wanted to recapture what was unique, what was truly terroir-driven about these individual wines and these individual wine cultures. And he came back to the wines of his father and his father's fathers. And what I love about Josko is he said that everything he does, he's always looking backwards. And he took a seminal trip to Georgia in 2000. And that's where he discovered the Georgian way of making wine from white grapes on the skins that had been prevalent in French wine.

And he brought it back to the fore in places like Slovenia prior to the Soviet era. And he brought it back to the fore. And he, along with other producers in Slovenia, like Radikhan and other producers throughout Italy, like Frank Cornelison, brought it into the modern era. And they established orange wine as a cult phenomenon, as a wine fad. And they contributed to this broader orange wine movement, which now has experienced an initial surge and backlash and kind of renaissance and subsequent backlash again. So we move in these cycles. But for me, orange wine is not just a fad. It is an ancient genre that we are just now re-exploring. It's a different way to paint, if you will. It's a universe of colors that we weren't utilizing that suddenly has become newly available to us. And that's what's so exciting to me about it. But for the sake of all of this, I'm going to end it here.

Oh, thank you, everybody. Freddy Process. And for all the others out there, and you know, Mendel and Jack, tonight's presenters. Thank you so, so much. And you're in great Portrait World of O, I think Noel got muted. I was a bit verbose in my introduction. No, I'm not studying to the modern underpinnings of wine culture there. Noel, you're unmuted once more, buddy. Apologies. No, it's okay. I always forget that when I mute myself for your sake, then you have to unmute me again. Yes, yes, exactly. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. You have the bottles there. I wanted to kick off here. Noel, where are you yourself from? You look like you could pass for a Georgian, especially with the traditional, you know, suit, the shokha that you're wearing there.

But where are you from originally? Yeah, originally I'm from Connecticut. Connecticut. And your heritage, sir, is it Georgian then? Or where are your people from? My peeps, I'm not about 75 to 80% English. So I'm a straight walk. Yeah, Brockett, maybe Brockett. Brockett. Yeah, Brockett is a small red deer, you know, that's found in the forests of England. And it's not very impressive, I guess, but that's where it comes from. But you are impressive, sir. How did you become an importer of Georgian wine through your label Georgian Winehouse? Yeah, so Georgian Winehouse started in 2004, which is a crazy thing to think about. As you know, Georgian wine has only sort of come on to the fore through many people who are on this Zoom call, including Bill, who's been doing a lot of good work and helping us.

But in 2004, I did not know that Georgia was a country. I certainly thought it was just a state. And that was pretty much true up until 2007, until some crisp nights in October, not so far away in Annapolis, Maryland. I met a beautiful and intelligent and passionate girl, a woman, and she was regaling me at a small liberal arts college that I was attending, it's called St. John's, about this place called Georgia and this amazing ancient history. And it's the birthplace of wine. It's mentioned in Herodotus and Thucydides, all these books that I've been reading under the name Colchis. And I was like, you're lying, but, you know, I'm going to keep nodding my head, you know. And I went home and I Googled it.

And I realized, of course, I was the idiot and didn't know anything. About anything. And then by, you know, I fell in love. And by 2008, you know, just eight months later, I was in Georgia, you know, running a nonprofit on education, often full of drunken wine, drunk on Georgian wine, as you would, as Bill can attest to, is how it is when you're in Georgia. You know, and I was a 20-year-old. I didn't know much about wine. I didn't have the budget, right, as a college student to learn about wine. And the different thing, the thing that really struck me in Georgia was that, you know, wine is just part of the culture, right. And it's more part of the culture than anywhere else. We say that about Italy and other places.

And I've been there and I can't, I love them. But there's something about Georgia where they honor wine in such a different way. And so I had this chance to sort of do wine and learn a lot and kind of form a palate, which was primarily around Georgian wines. And then I came back, finished college, and I wanted to work in Georgia, but I did not want to work for the State Department, because I like my freedom too much and I'm a little bit too rebellious. And in that time, if you wanted to work in Georgia, there weren't very many options. So I was working a software job running this nonprofit, and I quit that job.

And I started waiting tables at a restaurant, at an Italian restaurant, which was owned by a guy who had just bought a restaurant in a midlife crisis, had no business owning a restaurant. And I was like, hey, you know, do you know anything about Georgian wine? And he was from the Navy, so he had known about Georgia. And he said, yeah, I don't know anything about it, but do you want to sell it? And I said, yeah. So that's when I got the call up. The Georgian Wine House, who I've been bugging for many years and getting no response. And I said, hey, I can actually sell wine now. And they came. They're like, oh, they answered me right away. So like everything else, I stumbled into it.

And then a couple of, you know, about nine months of hand-selling Georgian wine to people who were looking for Nebbiolos and Barolos and making them buy it. You know, basically, I had the opportunity. It was a one-man shop then, so I just jumped right in and been working there since 2000. Yeah. And it's full-time since 2012, so. And now you, and now you run the show. Now, now we have, now luckily it's not just me anymore. There are other people, some people who are on this call who are involved. And yeah, we've got a lovely small team of people who, you know, make it happen and are, you know, make it, get most of the Georgian wine here. Awesome. So I wanted to start with Gogi's Orgo Sfane. And let's see.

Let's just taste this wine and then, you know, having tasted it, you know, try to understand, you know, how it was made and what that says about Georgian winemaking, you know, culture and, you know, methodology and so forth. So, you know, I think the first thing that, you know, I'm struck with, with these wines is the color, which feels, you know, you know, kind of facile. But it's beautiful, you know, it is a gorgeous, you know, shade, which I feel like is a big part of the problem with the term orange. You know, this feels more amber than it does orange, and you know, it's golden, you know, it looks like, you know, a raisin; it looks like it reflects the sun, you know.

And I think that, you know, that certainly speaks the place, you know, Georgia is cartoonishly beautiful and, you know, really, you know, very mountainous in a lot of places. It kind of looms in the shadow of the high Caucasus. And, you know, the color on this wine itself; it is kind of transported. But, you know, I like to ask folks when they come, how do you, you know, taste through these wines yourself when you're experiencing them and, you know, how did you, you know, first come to kind of fall in love with them, Noel? Yeah, well, particularly I'd have to say is the variety right here. I mean, and this is hard, you know, because it's a lot of people's maybe first amber wine or first orange wine or maybe one of the many that they've had, but it's been spread out.

You know, it's people rarely have the kind of drinking everyday amber wine. Like we do. I fell in love with Mitzvahane from in 2013, this variety, and for me, it was a revelation because Mitzvahane, which is the variety here, is typically vinified together with another grape variety, Ricotta Telli. It's almost always co-fermented and it wasn't until the last six, seven years where we start to see people doing it separately again, they kind of just showing the sophistication. So the wine. The wine that will always remind me of, you know, this wine reminds me of another wine, which is sort of like the archetype of Mitzvahane for me, which is a 2013 Chaluluri Cellars, which is one of some that we've had, there was a purchase of one of their wines on your guys too, but they really defined what Mitzvahane could be for me.

And I feel like this wine, particularly this vintage really harkens back to that, which is aromatics into this really amazing aromatics that are unique to Mitzvahane. And so Orgo. You know, how I got to them is that we, the winemaker Gokhi Dakashvili, was our base partner since 2004. And we basically latched onto him because we saw right away that he was one of the finest winemakers. And we basically, he was the same kind of thing as Josco Gravner. He was stuck making a lot of commercial wines because there was no other opportunity back then in 2001 to 2004. He likes those wines, don't get me wrong, but he was always making this style of wine at home.

And, you know, ever since I joined in and also the founder of the company was always tasting the wines, and, you know, he was like, 'We can sell these wines in America' and everybody was saying, 'Well, no, nobody's going to like this. Look at the color. They're going to think it's oxidized or they're going to also,' and he, we were able to support him and his dream to bringing these wines to fruition. And Orgo is kind of the second, the 2.0 version of that. And so that's how we got it connected to him. But Mitzvahane for me is this really lovely variety that has an intense body and has this lovely pairing of aromatics that will not confuse you to think that it's oxidized because it is, even though there's oxidative notes in there, there's this lovely fresh cut kind of floral thing going on, the tropical fruits that sometimes mixed with the tea, mixed with this, all the different things.

And it's different than Roccatatelli, again, another base point of what most people have had of Georgian wine, which I love too. But it's good. It's got this really aromatic, unique quality, particularly in the 2018, I feel like that's harkening back. So that's, that's the thing that jumps out to me right away. Because a lot of people, if you're not familiar, yes, they look at this lovely color. They might think it's going to be sweet or something like that, but it isn't right. It's the driest wine that you've ever had. It's kind of, it's kind of fascinating too. And there's something, you know, very opulent about the aromatics of it though. You know, there's, you know, real ripeness and a tropicality to this wine.

And then there's the added weight, you know, I think a big part of the point. The pleasure of the skin contact wines is the textural piece of them. And that's what makes them really thrive, you know, in the context of the Georgian table and with food. It's that weight, you know, that makes them as versatile as they are, but, you know, without putting the cart before the horse, Noel's mentioned a couple of varietals in Svané, which means green in the Georgian dialect. And it should be noted that there are actually a bunch of different varietals called Svané throughout Georgia that may or may not be related. There are, the Georgians would say 525 known varietals, genetically distinct varietals that come from Georgia.

And there's a lot of work being done to, you know, kind of isolate and propagate them and understand them more fully. Prior to the Soviet, you know, kind of usurpation of Georgia, well over, you know, five, six dozen of those green varieties. The second thing is that the Georgian, the Georgian grape and the Georgian grape were widely produced commercially. The Soviets stripped it down to six. The Soviet program, you know, the for whatever it's, you know, you know, merit state-sponsored socialism was not good when it came to making quality wine, it's very much a quantity over quality paradigm. And the collectivization project really ran roughshod over the local traditions of winemaking in various regions of Georgia. And in some harder ways than others.

That said, you know, there's a bit of a push-pull there because the Russians were always looking to Georgia for wine, and it was the source of most of the fine wine that your average, you know, Soviet, you know, nan drank at home. Most of those wines, though, came from larger commercial concerns and a lot of them were sweet and red. Now, we've mentioned that this is a wine that sees skin contact. How much skin contact did it see, Noel, and what kind of vessel was it made in? Yeah, so it's six months of skin contact, so this is why it's really important. I mean, why Georgians kind of want to distinguish between amber and orange, you know, is that in Kakheti, where this is made, it's a very strict sort of code of how it's always been made, and that's when when a lot of people talk about skin contact, it can be, a skin contact can be hours or it can be eight months, right, and there's a big difference in terms of that.

Just like a red wine can be aged on the skins for a few hours, or it can be, you know, or it can be aged for a month, right, there's a huge difference in terms of what it's going to turn out, and so that's one of the biggest things. When we talk about amber wines from Kakheti, it's almost strictly always six months. That's the kind of fast tradition. Now, part of that's for taste, part of that's just tradition, of the fact that Georgia lives in this very sort of Steinerian, cyclical, Orthodox Christian way, which is namely what comes about six months after harvest. Well, it's Easter, and Easter is the greatest feast, right, in Georgia, and typically prior to Easter, you're also fasting from wine and other things in Georgia, right, so you have this heavy, long extended skin contact style that exists in the eastern part of the country, and sometimes you ask, well, is it the food that came first or the wine that came first, because the wine pairs great with the food that's there, which is heavy shepherd food, you know, very meat-driven, very fat-driven, right, and the question is, did they have that already, or did they develop that cuisine? And, Noel, are you drinking wine a bottle at a time there, or are you drinking it, you know? Yeah, well, drinking is very different in Georgia. So, we should skip ahead here, though, sir. What type of vessel is this wine aging? Well, it's made in large clay jars called quevery.

This is QVE. V-E-V-R-I. It comes from the word quemut, and it's because it's a large clay jar that is buried underneath the ground, and this is the oldest winemaking style in the world. This is what the archaeological evidence is, is large, exactly, large clay shards that were found and used for specific testing for tartaric acid, but it's not even just that. There are about 34 different disciplines that proved that winemaking was happening 8,000 years ago in jars just like this. And to get kind of nerdy, the presence of tartaric acid is unique for the sake of grapes because they're one of the few fruits that contain a significant amount of tartaric acid, which is honestly what makes wine much more stable than the fermented beverages that come from other types of fruit, because certainly the Georgians make, you know, brandies, wines from a lot of different types of fruit, but they quickly discovered that Vitis vinifera made the best and most stable wines.

This is actually one of the most famous products that Georgians, a man named George Radzi, who is really kind of the dean of the Kvevri-making society, it is a very small society. These are all vessels that are shaped by hand. It is a highly artisanal product and it's an art that was essentially lost in the Soviet era and has re-emerged as Georgian wine has, you know, kind of re-emerged on the scene and there's no, you know, kind of recipe for these. These are all made by hand. You can see this is Zalico working with a coil of clay and he's basically kind of screwing it onto the edge of the pot as he goes, you know, you know, for the sake it's it's this kind of, you know, kind of larger coil that he's he's working with and you go row at a time and then leave it for a day or two depending on the humidity level to dry and then come back and do it all over again.

There's no mold and then he'll fire these essentially a room at a time, you know, a lot per month. So it is one of the most, you know, treasured and artisanal products that you could conjure and as such is this a intrinsic identifier for the sake of Georgian winemaking culture. Now that said, it would have been a storage vessel historically for things other than wine. But winemaking was its true purpose. And then for the sake of the marani, marani being the Georgian word for cellar, these vessels are buried in the very earth. So they are buried up to their neck and that would have been an ancient form of temperature control. And the wine left on the skins you see here starts to look like this. And there's some very poetic about it.

So first of all the shape of the vessel obviously is very egg-like, very womb-like. The Georgians, you know, they want to emphasize that connection to these various life forces. They say, so the bit here at the bottom, which is, you know, we would call pomace, so it's the seeds and skins left over. And during the initial part of fermentation, this would be a cap at the top of the fermentation vessel, but after fermentation finishes, the pomace settles at the bottom. The Georgians call this cha-cha. And they think that to raise a wine without its cha-cha or mother, to raise a wine without its mother, is profane. Now depending on the region, they will give the wine itself various amounts of time with that pomace or mother.

But they consider, you know, the idea of making non-orange wine, you know, somewhat profane. And there's kind of a modern, you know, reason for that, or we come to understand. There's a a scientific logic to that, which is these wines from white grapes that are aged on the skins, they pick up more stability. They become vastly more inured to kind of microbiological malfeasance after they spend some time on the skins there. So I want to share one last picture, and this is an image of the winemaker's cellar. So this is Goggi's Marani, and we have a really wonderful collection here. And Noel talked about, you know, Goggi being a really important figure for the sake of the evolution of Georgian wine from this kind of initial beginning into a 2.0.

What did you mean by that, Noel? Well, I mean Orgo is 2.0 because this is a family who Goggi has. A son, who is a professional winemaker already, who is only about 25 years old. And he loves his wife, who's a winemaker as well. And so they have their own house just about a kilometer from where Orgo is located, where they can produce 16,000 bottles of wine for themselves. And they were for many, many years, for their entire time, so they have this and they have their own private label as well. And so Orgo was this kind of setting where we were able to restart again in about 2011 when people were really starting to come around where it works. Gogi has this great hybrid style.

His wines are going to be extremely clean and correct, but extremely low intervention. So more of the Josco Gravner style, somebody who has a great amount of knowledge on winemaking, but is deeply in love with the tradition. And so his wines, the Orgo came about where he has three vineyards that are all older vines. They're about 50 or 60 years old. One of them is actually 80 years old. And what we talk about Georgia being the birthplace of wine, a lot of the wines that were put on the market are from new vines. And again, that's a Soviet legacy. So he was like, I want to start this project that's specifically focusing on older vines. So it started with his vineyards, but it's also working with growers about creating sustainability.

So he works with growers with long-term contracts who otherwise would be ripping up their old vines because they get paid by the kilo. If you're a grower, you don't necessarily know how to make better wine with older vines. So he worked with them and that's how Orgo started. And as you see in that cellar, that cellar capacity, if you were just making one round in those quiveries, that's a capacity of about 20,000 to 30,000 bottles. And so again, for Georgia, that's considered large, medium to size. In America, that's like microscopic. Most people in California can rent space and make more wine. Well, I think there's some, something like really poetic to understand, you know, in drinking something like this, that it is that artisanal.

So, you know, if you're drinking this bottle of wine, it came from one of those holes in the ground, you know. The thing to also point out too, that I just wanted to make that point real quickly is that based on that quivery maker, I mean, people should really know when you're drinking wines like this, you know, we always talk about making an impact or whatever, and I don't want to overstate those things, but I don't think Georgia is the place where you can't overstate it. Like by purchasing this bottle of wine, you're not going to overstate it. You're going to overstate it. You are making that tradition continue to exist. And that is very much the case when by, by restaurants continue having sold these wines when nobody cared and other things like this, and having 200 people on the call, you know, paying attention to this.

249. Yeah, there you go. Is that, you know, you guys literally buy the bottles that you purchase makes a huge difference, you know, for those people when he now has back orders to make quiveries. I can tell you 10 years ago. No. There was nothing. There were five people left. And again, now there's a group of people who are interested, young people who are like, 'Oh, I should pay attention to this.' And what's kind of really important. Yeah. And what's, what's really wild about Georgian culture too, is that, you know, you are none of this is, is novel and you're rediscovering all these like wonderful ancient traditions. So in as much as there is a terroir of these individual grapes, like Sangiovese or Cazzabatelli, Georgians will speak about a terroir of qvevri.

You know, they'll talk about quiveries made with different types of clay from different types of regions, having a different kind of impact on an individual wine ferment. And, you know, that's something that, you know, was entirely lost and that, you know, these Georgian quiver makers are just kind of starting to, to rediscover. And I think that's, that's really special. Now, let's transition a bit and taste the second wine that I have here, which is from a different grape called Chinuri. We haven't talked about Georgia geographically that much. I'm going to pull up a map here. Noel, will you tell us a little bit about that? I'll tell everyone where Gogi's wine is from and where the Chinuri is from and how those regions compare and, you know, how the styles of winemaking kind of differ, typically, given the grapes and given the geography.

All right. Well, look at that map. Okay, great. So we are looking, I'm going to move my people over to the side here. Great. So Tbilisi is that red dot. That is the central, that is the capital of Georgia. And just about an hour away from the city of Georgia is the capital of Georgia. And just about an hour and a half, if you go to the right or to the east, to the light blue region of Kakheti, this is where Oh, sorry. No, just, just for the sake of giving people a frame of reference, Georgia itself is about the size of the state of West Virginia. Christian Connor, shout out. So geographically, that's what you're dealing with. It is similarly mountainous, too. So, you know, you say about the size of West Virginia.

But there's no Robert Dole, you know, like, there's nobody, Robert Byrd, like, giving out highway funds. So it takes a long time to get from one end of Georgia to the other, but it's not a huge country. Yeah, it's, it's really tiny. I mean, again, on the maps, they always look big, but you know, you can Google it and zoom out, you'll realize it's tiny. And it's strange that such a tiny place, but that's, that's the truth of early birthplaces, they have outlarged influences. And the main thing that's not really shown here, exactly right, as Bill is saying, is mountains, you know, it's not just mountains. It's hard to have topographical maps and also regional maps, but they often generally run with the mountains.

So the different regions that you see here, they're all that big green stuff. You know, that's not a region, even though those actually are regions, they're just not wine growing regions. Those are all mountains, and vary, of varying sizes. So if you look at Kakheti over here, the central part is towards exactly where the line of Kakheti is called Telavi. This is almost exactly where cellar is of Orgo, but a lot of the vineyards are actually slightly up towards Ahmeta. And the reason why I want to point that out is that the the region of this Kakheti it's you know it's like a long skinny region and from the northern border up to the top, that that green part and then the part that borders Azerbaijan, these are two very, very tall mountain ranges: the northern one is the Caucasus mountains, the tallest mountains in Europe.

If you drew your borders of Europe down there, and we would like you to do that for Georgia's political stability, and in the southern part is this is the lesser Caucasus range. And so basically, the Kakheti is a V big huge Valley sandwiched between two mountain ranges right? And this is important because it's no coastal influence or anything; like this, but it's a very continental climate. So it's cold you know, cold nights hot days. So you're off, you don't have this in general in that area as you get down towards the very tip towards Azerbaijan. You do get more hot semi-it's a semi-desert area. So in the span of about a two-hour drive, you have a drastic climate diversity.

Already showing you in just one region so it's like California down towards Azerbaijan Ahmeta it's up in the foothills and it's you know it's a little bit lighter even though you're gonna get great sugar but the wines are never gonna get over 13% alcohol where Gobi is from and that's generally where it is. And then Noel we're drinking a wine from a grape called Chinuri that hails from the region of Kartli which is the region in and around Tbilisi, what is the climate like there? So, Tbilisi is is actually in Kartli, so there's north we call it upper Kartli and lower Kartli. And so if you see Tbilisi just directly up is Mtskheta, and just very close to there is where Tevza is from, and so Kartli again, it's a very rural region.

There's no uh less hot uh in general, you get this valley that's going through, so you get quite a good bit of uh winds because you get that hot, you can have a lot of hail damage which is the probably the biggest problem that you have there. But Kartley is even more uh continental, you get less heat, so you typically are seeing wines that uh sometimes struggle to get to 13 but it's still the second-largest wine potential wine-growing region. It's one that suffered the most under communist rule, so you're getting um again it's very similar In terms of alluvial soil, so alluvial just means sediment that's come down from, you know, rock sediment that's come down from uh rivers from the mountains, so you're not getting a lot of clay or anything like that, you're getting more alluvial, so more calcareous soils.

So it's similar in that respect, but you get a little bit more in confetti, so there's a little bit more brown uh uh top soil, I mean black forest top soil in Cartley because it used to be more forested as well. Um, and so it's a little bit more moderate. You're typically getting wine great varieties that are doing between uh 12 and 13, sometimes you know 2018 was a great year. For hot weather, so we all of the wines were 13 or so um and you're getting way different varieties but again it's one of the most underrepresented wine regions in Georgia because of a Soviet legacy where they ripped up almost especially during uh Perestroika times they ripped up a lot of the vineyards in that particular area, so you're typically seeing white grapes very few red grapes but you do have some coffee though.

Top query but we're drinking Qvevri which I think is one of the grapes that has the next big potential, I really think. But the plantings are so tiny it's insane, but I really love where it it could be for us. As a sort of Noel, take a break, uh, taste said Chinuri. Think on some tasting notes, Thompson, uh, we've been neglecting you, uh, for the sake of this exercise and for the sake of our commentariat. Uh, what do you have, uh, in the way of queries? Um, a number of things actually, um, I think people really want to know what the appropriate drinking temperatures are for these, as they're drinking them, should they put them back in the fridge as they're enjoying them or should they leave them out.

No, um, so I'm a huge advocate, uh, across genres, you know, having a wine attempt and maybe having it like a tick or two colder, uh, than you know, and then you know bringing the bottle out and letting it uh come up uh intent as you drink it and getting a sense of how the wine evolves um accordingly now not everybody loves that you know if you're dinner with your sister and brother-in-law and you're drinking white wine and they just want it cold then you're not going to have much patience with you um you know for the sake of your intellectual enjoyment of uh you know particular wine but um that's that's what i like i find that cool um i think in a perfect universe um you know you'd have like a third wine zone  for stuff like this that's you know somewhere between white temp and And red temperatures, so you know, hovering in the 50s, um, you know, so typically you think about serving whites uh for the sake of Fahrenheit, um, you know, um, you know, at the upper end of that, you know, and reds at the lower end of the 60 degree frame, and and I think you really want your orange wines, you know, somewhere in that and in that continuum, and I think you know typically the lighter the wine, you know, the slightly lower uh in temperature you would you would enjoy it, but you know for the sake of guests at the restaurant, you know, we would because we don't have unlimited storage capacity, typically serve these wines.

At White Temp, I would encourage our guests to leave them on the table um because I think they get a lot more dynamic and interesting as they as they warm up because they have this dual identity you know, on the one hand, they're from white grapes but on the other hand, they're made like red wines, and I think you know leaving them out embraces that. I love it! Can I jump just real quickly? Yeah, fire away! Yeah, it's uh the the fun thing to do is to drink white wine and I think you're at home like you've got a bottle of wine is to play with these temps because I think for Bill and I it's really evident but the Origo for example if you're drinking The orgo, like many of you are, that this wine in my opinion is so muted at a at a fridge temperature, you know what I mean, and it's so much more pretty those aromatics are so much there.

So, what I suggest really is, like this is the time you're at home, you've got nowhere to be, pour yourself a couple different glasses, put some in the fridge, don't others. You know, you're at home, you're at home, you know, go cycle through see what temperature is all about because I think particularly in these wines it makes a big difference that they're closer to between 55 and 60 degrees, just like Bill is saying, let them be there. then find optimal temperature for you obviously if you like things a little bit colder the chanuri for example closer to 50 okay i think but this wine really wants to be about 60 60 degrees because it just there's this whole aromatic side and this whole structure side that you're going to miss if it's not a wine that you're going to miss

and it should be said so you know the one of the distinguishing features for the sake of orange wines um because they come from white grapes and the sea screen contact is is uh you know those tannins you know those those tea like um you know long chain polymers they give you um you know that perception Of bitterness and astringency, and um, as you bring something down in temperature, your perception of those is heightened in a in a kind of a negative uh way, and so you know, as you let it come up a little bit, you know the the tannins in these wines exercise a little bit less of an outsized influence, especially in something like the Sémillon. Is there a typical time um amount that Georgian wines spend on the skins?

I think people are looking to see whether there's like you know it's traditionally six months, I mean I would say like it varies by region so when I was there um and again I'm not the expert that that Noel is but um you know the the paradigms that i heard were you know the the the the the corrios ones the Imperials ones will be using cachaete while making wine when that okay so they're they're sort of tasteмотрите like a different style of very timber than theля so there's very very lots of different other ways of making wine so we we often go with you know normal wine um one of them is the при direct you know traditional like azure and uh here is corn Caraway faganata the cachaete you know you know made in the agranium basalt reed and cheese or and like could have the competition in it as well which is really phenomenal but i think um woods is uh especially they when they're sold we're very much concernedifornia it's not prisoner i think they're all-abyteed you mean of course the earlier wine isаны worry about that quite as much. And the tendency for the skin contact whites is to want some over-rightness in your grapes. So they harvest the reds, they throw them into the cadaveri buried in the womb of the earth, and then they rush those through primary fermentation, takes about a couple weeks, a week, two weeks, and then they rack them off into other smaller clay jars, and then they quickly 86 all that cha-cha, I promise, scrub them down, throw the new, in this case, Svane, Cotitelli, whatever, grapes, pommas in the mix, and then lay them down, seal.

Six months later, Easter, you open cadaveri. And typically, Georgians, unsealing cadaveri would be an event, and you would kind of drink the wine in a ritual context, kind of like more or less all at once. Like cadaveri would be an event, it would be a serving size, which is madness. But the Georgians go hard. I mean, like having visited, like it takes a while to, it does take a few days. Well, I don't know if I ever got used to it, but they go hard. And this is a good kind of segue to talk about like Georgian food culture, life revolves around these ritual meals, and the ritual style of dining is called supra, and it's like war of attrition.

So you go to a table, it's laid out with all of these amazing, like fermentables are a big deal, so like pickles, and then there'll always be some kind of cold fish. And so everything is laid out already. And then they continue to bring out like meat on a stick, stews, all this other stuff. And it's basically this like white flag paradigm. They will continue to bring out food until you're like totally sated. And that's the beauty of wines like this, is that they are sufficiently versatile to go with, you know, that panoply of dishes over the course of a meal. But from what I've heard of it, they would allocate like two liters per person for a given soup. Yeah, it's crazy. That's amazing. Yeah.

So I know that may be a typical serving size. But I spoke, I was circling back to the skin contact, the Cacatian recipe, six months on the skins, the Imeretian, so Imereti is, so Noel spoke to Cartley, Imereti is the region further, just further West. Cartley makes a lot of wine, but I think like Imereti has a very historic role to play in terms of, you know, the importance; it's important in terms of like styles of wine making, and they tend to leave the wines in contact with skins for a much shorter period of time. It's cooler there. Typically, it's just through primary fermentation. So about two weeks of skin contact. and they're different

recipes so sometimes they would you know you would throw all the grapes in the mix and leave them on the skins for you know two weeks other times you would maybe only throw a third of the skins in the mix and leave them you know leave the wine on the skins for a few months it varies but skin you do less skin contact in the cooler climate that is Imereti typically than you would in a warmer place like Keheti so there's much more diversity of styles for the sake of Georgian orange wine that I think most people realize it should be said that Keheti is like the California of Georgia it makes about you

know 80 to 90 percent of the wine that comes out of the country and the Soviets really pushed winemaking in Keheti at the expense of other regions that's not to say that these other regions didn't have winemaking histories it just wasn't as easy to make wine there and the Soviet paradigm was all about you know efficiency you know and so I think that's a really good point and I think that's a really good point it's only in the wake of the collapse of Soviet Union that these regions like Imereti and Samogrelo and Guria which is where Noel's wife is from are rediscovering their winemaking roots but you know those wines tend to be lighter in style and they tend not to fit in with something like Orgozvani they're like utterly different you know they're like you know Loire Valley wines they're not like you know you know your typical like Sonoma or you know this is almost like Napa Valley orange wine you know Imereti wines are hugely different and I think that's something that you know people often miss when they think of you know orange wine more broadly and Georgian orange wine as a as a genre is there's there's as much you know variety contained therein as there is with any other genre and I think you know that's the thing that's much more interesting to start to parse is to you know start to consider orange wine less as a cliche and start to consider you know these individualistic wines as a cliche and start to consider you know these individualistic iterations um you know more specifically now in addition to that question the we were wondering um that covevery may be in a normal pour size for hanging out together but how do you actually get it out of there into the bottle people want to know I know, I'll let you. I'll let you take that. Uh, well, you know, there's a variety of methods now. Um, back in the day it was ladling you know, um, and there are some people who are super traditionalists, even most of the traditionalists these days don't ladle it out one by one anymore.

Um, but there's a whole there's a there's a lot of different ways that are being done now. Um, but so the first, obviously, would be ladling it out. They had so the covevery wine cellar has a whole array of tools that are ancient that were developed over throughout the year, so you have cleaning tools, you know, the first kind of big ladle that you could. Do the one that's on two sticks that can get all the way down to the bottom, but most people these days are using a soft pressure pump to get them out. You know what happens in quiver? We didn't talk about I mean, a little bit is that we saw that picture, that there's a natural filtration process that happens when you open the quivery; what's in the clarity that's in here of the mitswane is what the top part of the juice is.

So, there's a point, it's a special name for it, it's called Zedashay, which would be the head, really or something like that in English, and so, there's a natural filtration process that's happening; so you would try to. bring those out sort of separately now again people are pumping it out there's some people who are using gravity they've made retractable ways at the bottom of their quivery so they can they can funnel it down either from the bottom or they can put a they can use the you know the principle of gravity where you can put a hose in it and get it down so people are building their cellars that way now that you can do everything by gravity but in general people are pumping it out with low pumps so that it's not disturbing the wine too much got it yeah which is to say it's no different than the almost any other you know yeah modern modern Winery, um, can you all speak to, um, the age ability of some of these, uh, yeah, I'll let no speak to that, but they're amazing. It's it's I think they i mean Caietí in particular it depends on the winemaker and it depends on the year for sure, but in general it's the rule is these wines have uh in their best form the orange wines actually so both of those things are spectacular for age ability um those are the two things that are sort of the natural preservatives that you get in wine obviously both of these are what we haven't touched on our sort of natural low intervention wines which is the general uh kind of ether of Georgia where we're Adding small amounts, very tiny amounts of preservatives so that that which is sulfites, so that they you know at least taste somewhat similar when they get to the U.S as opposed to how they are um that's that's an excellent uh segue into a question that people may or may not have asked uh Thompson but I wanted to address for the sake of this uh class is um no are these natural lines yeah you know um the A great Eric Isomoff finally jumped on the on the on the bandwagon here Eric Isomoff is the uh you know very influential and and for my sake much beloved a New York Times uh critic but working for the great lady a bit of a you know Kind of, um, he speaks for you know, the, the establishment to some extent, yeah, I mean, I just take it as a good sign that he wrote 'anybody should get' I found his article was really nice, um, and it's about, it was about specifically about amber wine, but it was in general, I think it was a cursory way to talk about natural wine, and you know, natural wine, um, is uh, a nebulous thing, it's somewhat becoming more concrete, and I also like to think, I love it, I like to kind of do this exact parallel with you know what that first question that you had or one of the questions you had, uh, Sarah, is that you know what does it, what's the standard for skin contact and the real correct answer to that is that there's no standard but there's ways of doing it because it's an entire category of wine and the same with natural wine is the same thing is that there are kind of mores and philosophies behind it and the people who are into it can understand that like some people meet it more or less but there's a dogmatic side of it and there's just a practical side of it that natural wine is all about low intervention and when the natural wine movement sort of comes into play it's not just a practical side of it it's a strategic side it's everything, it's more like there's a powerful side of it, like that's when it really gets to you so i don't have any other libel yes there's another story i wanted to and then maybe if we just move it if you're already watching and you're a beginner like we're gonna get kind of thesters relayed but it has to happen that both the better but still the higher quality of the wine that you prefer is the alcohol that Очень to me is really one of the pressing parts like success and it's a vraiment important period and i think it's really important for us as people to respect when you're doing a, quote mode championships i've noticed in the to just sell, right? So now Georgia sort of fits into this natural wine thing, which again, I think in general, people accept because the idea that you can add things to wine, that you can manipulate it to taste a very certain way.

We've been talking about food for the last 20 to 30 years in the same way, like let's get all this manipulation out of our food. Why not say the same in wine? And if you can, let's do it. And so for me, when I say natural wine, yes, these do fit into the kind of categories of natural wine. They're low sulfur, they're low intervention, there's no manipulation, there's almost, there's zero fining, there's no filtration, right? But what more is important for me about the philosophy of natural wine is that it's teaching us that we should be paying attention to what's in the wine. And there's so many wines that are not marketing themselves as natural, who are natural because they just are making high quality wine and they're doing it well.

And so that's what I would like to see when I look at a natural wine is that we realize we can pay attention. We can ask questions. But in general, we don't have to do as much if we care about the product in a different way, you know, as something that's not in so mass market. Noel, can I ask you a broader question that's come up, which is how do you discover new wines in Georgia? What's your process? Well, you know, Georgia is like, we talked about the seven degrees of separation in Kevin Bacon, right? Georgia is about one to two degrees separation. It's literally our favorite conversation. And what you do in Georgia when you meet a new Georgian is find out the people you know that are who is who is related to who you have, you find out you have some shared really relative.

And you have a you have an in yourself because you're married to a Georgian woman. I imagine, you know, I imagine that if I wasn't so deeply a part of the culture, and there I mean, I watch this now because there are other importers who are interested in getting into the game. And I'm all about that, you know, and I can I feel for them, I consult with them, I talk with them, because it's hard to get into the culture. Georgia is really welcoming. But the big thing is that, you know, my the owner of our company is Georgian, you know, we have people there that we trust, you know, we're there all the time. And a lot of it's, you know, for me, it's passion.

So for example, we'll next wine class we do on Georgia, we'll do all about glory and wines. Well, that's a project for me, you know. My family is that, you know, my family is, part of my family is from there from Georgia, we have an old house that's there, you know. I love the wines, but the winemaking tradition was almost dead. And, you know, so we spent 10 years looking for people, you know. Every time that I got to go there, whether it was a week or whether it was three weeks, my goal, I said, guys, get stuff ready for me, find out who's making wine, we're going to go walk around. And what that means is my mother-in-law calling six different random cousins and just being like, 'Yo, who makes wine?' And the way that I found the winemaker, who I'm in love with right now, was like, I was out there on a trip, I was like, exhausted, I didn't find what I didn't find people who were making the wines that I wanted to see. And my very best friend, you know, happens to be talking to his uncle who's in the who's in the army. And he's like, 'Hey, what you know,' he's just in his uncle's just calling him to check in, because that's what you do with family in Georgia. So he calls him like, 'Hey, what are you doing?' He's like, 'Oh, I'm traveling around Gloria with my friend.' I'm leaving tonight.' And he's like, 'Why are you in glory is like,' 'Oh, we're looking for wine.' And he's like, Oh, you know, I saw my friend from the army from 20 years ago posted on Facebook that he won this thing and bought to me like, maybe you should call him up.

He's like, I'll get you the number. And literally called this guy up and just showed up at his house. And he's like, he's the he's the king of glory and wines, you know what I mean? But it took me 10 years to find him, you know. And so that's kind of a little bit of like how it is in Georgia - that it's a lot of labor and most of it's just connections. So it has very little to do with me; it has more to do with the people helping me. So I wanted to say, Sarah, we're going to take all the questions here. I want to ask Noel about the outfit that he is wearing. Before I close things out, yeah, well, this will close out that those are Coravin capsules.

Yeah, that's right. I need that many Coravin capsules. So, Noel, what is that? What is that dress called? So it's a Georgian chokha. I like to call it my man dress, because it's a dress down here, you can't see. But it's what Georgian men it was Georgian suit and tie for about a lot, you know. So this is at the main Georgian May wine fair and a bunch of Georgian stereotypes posing for the cameras. What is it called, Noel? So that's, that's chokha ahalukh, which is ahalukhi is the is the shirt underneath. And I kind of brought into I took a page off of Vogue, who was trying to, the Georgians are into fashion and they were promoting chokha as the new next big thing last year or so.

And they're, you know, pairing it with modern clothing. So typically, there was, you know, boots and pants that were good for horse riding and this kind of thing. But I just kind of wear it with the regular, you know, button up and, and try to make it more similar. But there is a group of people which are called the Chokhasani, which is the ones who wear chokha, and they're really trying to bring it back. So there are people who are walking around the city, you know, dressed up in chokha. But, you know, typically, this would be gunpowder canisters. And you saw the dagger on there as well. That's because in Georgia, you know, it's this, it's the Silk Road, it's been conquered countless times, the capital city has been burnt down and rebuilt over 19 times.

Georgia was always, you know, when you're going out of your house, you're like, you're either going to meet a friend. So you bring wine or you bring your dagger and your gun because you're going to meet another person. I mean, you never know which one it's going to be on Tuesday. So you just go out and see how it's going to be. And that, their dress kind of reflects that, right. And there's all different kinds. You know, again, this is just one style is more of the noble style. But there was your everyday chokha that was your, your fancy chokha. There was all different styles. But you know, something that I got married in. So I try every excuse to wear it as I can. This particular garment was the one you got married in.

It's the only tailored garment in my whole life. And I don't know if I have any other, I need to get a second one because I keep wearing it everywhere. And everybody's like, so I said, 'I want to put in a boat for like a 70s era Saturday Night Fever kind of polyester shirt under the chokha.' I feel like that would be a good look. And I liked what you spoke to Noel. So it should be said that I know is one of my favorite people in the in the wine trade. One of my favorite things about him is the way that he, you know, kind of fell headlong into the wine business. So he pulled at a thread for the sake of, you know, the love of his life, and he kept pulling at it.

And it took him in this, you know, wildly divergent, unexpected direction. And, you know, he was still able to pursue things that he was passionate about, and, you know, literature and music. But he, you know, was able to do it, while exploring this amazing culture that he never knew before. And, you know, Georgia has that effect on people. You know, I think that it's impossible to dismiss orange wine as a fad, you know, having immersed yourself in Georgian wine, just because it is such an intrinsic and natural part of their ritual life, that, you know, there's just something, you know, wonderfully lived in about it, you know, it, you know, immediately, and yet, it's not an indication of a fad, you know, it's not an indication of a fad.

It is the essence of any notion of something being faddish. It's essentially eternal and timeless. It's 8,000 years strong, you know, it's the antithesis of a fad. And I think that's, you know, worth exploring. I like the idea that, you know, orange wine, and in particular, is something that is ancient, that we are just now rediscovering. And, you know, I like the idea that, you know, for the sake of, you know, kind of falling down this rabbit hole, and, you know, looking at these old ways of being, you know, we are opening up a world of possibilities for ourselves. And then I'm going to transition into my, you know, kind of weekly deep thought. And, you know, for the sake of pandemic, that is, you know, something else that has been with us always.

You know, pandemic and plague are staples of civilization. They're staples of urban life. It's just been a century since our last one collectively and globally. So no one, you know, given the span of our limited lives has a full sense of how they play out. And as we recover, I want us to, or my hope is that, you know, we consider the, you know, the new possibilities that can come from an event like this as painful as it is, for all of this. For me, Wine School has been one of those. And my hope is that, you know, life will go on and that we'll be able to recapture some of the things and many of the things that we once enjoyed, but we'll also be able to live into the lessons that this moment forced upon us.

So to that end, thank you so much for joining us, Noel Brockett. You're not off the hook. No, Sarah has all the questions for us. Thank you guys so much for joining us. In our new studio space, we will, you know, keep on trucking. Even if there are folks in the dining room, we'll get James to wreck the curtain and we'll be with you on Sundays, alone together as always. My love. Bill, you got to let me, you know how this is going to go. So Noel, what is that horn? So this is Kansi, which is in Georgia, as we like to say, we like to drink out of horns. You know, they're big horns, they're small, you know, small horns, everybody's got a different size, the one that works for them.

It's what you do with it, right? This is after hours wine school, Noel. That's right. And what you need to do with it is drink it. But the culture of Georgia is so spot on. I want to just continue what Bill's saying, because I know Bill and love him as well and find him as a great inspiration and a great supporter, obviously, of what we do. But what I like about Bill is that he's a great supporter of what we do. And he's a great supporter of what we do. And Bill looks past the surface of stuff. And you know, he's going to end his class with a deep thought, which is important, because it's important to be looking deeper, right, in the midst of our experience. And what I want to just continue.

So in Georgia, we never drink without toasting. And when toasting isn't like just like cheers or lahayim, it's speeches. And so your supra is a four-hour experience, where it's more like a philosophy class than it is, you know, a drinking game, right? And even though it is probably the original drinking game, is that you, when you drink, in Georgia, there's a really important sense that it's it's partaking of the divine in this really way. And again, it comes from this culture, where, you know, you have a lot of grape juice, you know, than more than other places, but it still would run out, you know what I mean? And there was times where you don't have it. And so you kind of really treated it as sacred, obviously, it's connected to the sacred rituals of Christianity, that's so important.

And that's what we know that in Georgia as well. But what I want to just say is that toasting is so important. And what I want to offer each one of you guys as your home, your home with your families, is to get, you know, after maybe the first glass of wine, get a little bold, say something that's meaningful, say something that's deep, say something that's deep and meaningful to each other. Because this is the the time that we have exactly what you're saying, Bill. This is the time that we have to embark on things that maybe we've been putting off; relationships that we've maybe neglected. This is the time for us to to seek after beautiful things, even though it feels like things are crashing down around us.

Um, but really what I love about Georgia and what I love about Georgian wine and the Georgian spirit embodies for me um is that in the face of everything falling apart, you know being conquered, whatever it is; you look to what's beautiful and you try to preserve it and you try to produce beautiful things in the midst of whatever circumstance you are. So whether that's saying a kind word, maybe it's saying a deep thought, whatever it is; in the most basic sense, what I wish for you all in this time is to do and seek after beautiful things, whether they're big things that you've been putting off, whether they're mundane things. Do it with that spirit because that's what Georgia's taught you to me, and that's why I'm very thankful to be connected to it; and I hope that's the word that I can share to you.

so to beauty to your beautiful things we call it means victory to your beautiful deeds so and i'll drink it all for you so you're you are supposed to you're supposed to finish the horn that is that is part of the ritual well that's the trick is that you get handed this at a supra and you're like oh they're like can you hold this for me and you're like okay and you hold it and then they fill it with wine and you realize you can't put it down so you're kind of stuffed with it you know i said i think i feel like a virtual supra could be in our future and all but we could all use it and i think we and i feel like we're we are just it should be said there's there's so much to unpack here uh noel spoke to you know this small place that was built into this that is at the beginning of things.

And, you know, it's really significant to consider, you know, that moment at the beginning, so much comes out of it. And I've read these snippets of history that the Romans, when they were traveling in the Caucasus, they brought like dozens of translators because there's so many diverse language groups there. And there's just such diversity to explore for the sake of culture and wine there. And, you know, in as much as we're presenting on Georgian wines here, and a relatively minuscule country on the global stage, I feel like we're just scratching the surface. And that's the really exciting thing for me about the future of Georgian wine and Georgian winemaking. Thompson, what do you got for us? No, you again? You're muted. Oh, wow, there we go. Add that to the blooper reel, as always.

Sarah Thompson forgot to be unmuted. There we go. Kick it. Well, I think people really want to know, especially outside the DC area, how they can support the Georgian wine market. There are people in Florida and Nevada, and a lot of other places here on the chat line who really just want to know how they can support and how they can purchase wines that you're bringing. That's awesome. Thank you for wanting to do that. It's very kind. And all of our winemakers are supportive of that as well. You know, it depends on the market. So our websites are always difficult because, you know, sometimes accounts have the wine, sometimes they don't. So we don't try to list everybody on there. But in general, you can see on our website, which is georgianwinehouse.com, what states we have distributors in.

And the way to, that's always something that I think is really important for most wine consumers to know is that we run, you know, in a three-tier system where there are retailers and restaurants who bring you the wines on the last step, but there's distributors and importers who are behind them that make, you know, the selections that are possible for them to take. And what I would just suggest is, okay, take a look at their first. I could list them to you, but, you know, you probably wouldn't remember, but, you know, there's, we're present in about 15 different markets or states, you know. And so, you know, the best thing to do is, okay, take a look at the distributor.

Not every distributor has every wine that we have, but you could contact them and just say, 'Hey, I want Georgian wine.' And that's it, literally it's their job to be like, 'Oh, Bill at Caleb Goat has it,' or whatever. That's their job, you know, to get back to you. But that being said, there are many states that we don't currently have distribution in. And so the easiest way is to order online. Obviously there's, there are about 18 or so states that don't allow direct sales of wine into from the internet, but hopefully that'll change. Maybe that'll be a nice byproduct of the pandemic. It seems certainly is nice that, you know, we can be doing this. And I also encourage everybody to support the endeavor of continuing to allow restaurants to sell directly to consumers off-premises, something that DC has been really behind on.

They've extended it to November, but I really suggest let's continue it on, you know, the retailers are gonna be fine. But that's- Definitely, yes. So that is, so we are as a country now over a hundred years removed from the repeal of prohibition, but we are still very much living in the legacy of the laws that derive from it. So we are as a restaurant able to sell these wines to you through an exemption granted by the city for the sake of this pandemic. But, you know, our continued ability to do so is by no means assured. And, you know, it's a simple, you know, it's a very simple customer service to provide and it's not going to, you know, lead anyone to, you know, personal, you know, ruin.

And I think the sector can definitely support it. So, you know, that is a small structural fix that really makes a big difference. And it should be said that, you know, these are wines that need advocates, you know, they're not the kinds of wines that, you know, you just kind of wander into a retail setting and, you know, stumble upon, you know, very few people do that. There are a few retailers that, you know, aggressively work at that. And there are some, you know, amazing ones in Washington. You know, Domestique does a lot of that. You know, the guys at Gran Cata do that, you know, in their own way. The guys at, you know, MacArthur do that and Cork Market.

And, you know, there are a handful, but, you know, that's it, you know, largely speaking; the people that sell wine, the people on Noel's position, when they're looking to unload wines that people aren't familiar with, they're going to sell them to restaurants. Restaurants are the drivers of, you know, kind of a new phenomenon, you know, wines that don't have champions, because they're the kinds of wines that are hand-sells, you know, they're the kinds of wines that need an interlocutor and need a sommelier. And, you know, I think if we open up the universe of retail to people in our position, you know, hopefully the wine landscape gets all the more interesting for it and no one is, you know, driven to, you know, moral ruin. Or financial, you know, dissolution.

You know, there's no ill, you know, there's no kind of like societal downside to it. It's just the fact that coming out of prohibition, we kicked it to the states and, you know, they were conservative about, you know, what they allowed. You know, so that's one big, one huge fix. Yeah. Yeah, I'll just jump in to say that DC is great on so many other parts of it. I mean, it allows restaurants so much unprecedented access to wines that many other states don't. They don't allow by the permitting system. But it's just a simple fix that could be continued. And, you know, when you hear about that later, again, it's extended to November, but let's, you know, when you hear about it later, be a voice for it. It'll be great.

The last thing I was just gonna say is that where people can buy online is potomacwines.com. And if you just search for Georgia or GWH, which is Georgian Winehouse, you'll see our entire portfolio. And these are, again, a tiny retailer, who is some of the smartest people in DC, who invested in us way back in 2004, hardworking, great people, who send our wine all across the country. So that's my go-to, say, if you're in Florida, for example, that's the place to go to. And you pay for shipping, but again, you know, that's the kind of premium of being able, you know, to get a wine that's so unique. And I'll make sure I send around that link for the sake of our recap tomorrow. Absolutely. What else you got, Thompson?

You don't need it again, are you? No, no, no, you're fine. I think that's really it, unless you, you know, you wanna delve into the realm of orange wines from other places, or we can do that in the recap email. It's a fascinating, so I think it's important to note that Georgia doesn't have a monopoly on, you know, orange wine, you know, as a phenomenon or as a tradition. Georgia doesn't have a monopoly on wine aged in clay. That was something I wanted to kind of address that I circumvented, you know, for the sake of, you know, getting to Knoll. But aging wine in oak is a new thing. In the 8,000, in the pantheon of the 18th, like 8,000 years that wine has been with us, barrels as a aging vessel for wine have only been with us for 2,000 years.

So that really began when Julius Caesar invaded Gaul, or modern day France, and they in Gaul at the time and elsewhere in the Iberian Peninsula had developed barrel making as a way to store their beer. And the Romans quickly realized that it was a lot more efficient than using the clay that they had been using and that the Greeks had been using to transport their wines for thousands of years. And that's really when barrels came into the mix. But you have these like small pockets of Europe that had these like really interesting traditions of aging wine in clay. And they're in parts of Spain, they're in parts of Portugal, they're in parts of Northern Italy. And I find them hugely interesting. And very often where you see clay, you see white wine with skin contact as well.

So there's just, there's a lot to unravel there. And it's really, it's really fun. I did want to, if you had individual questions, especially about the wines that people bought from us, I'm happy to address those. But, you know, the orange wine scene is not limited to Georgia, by any means. I guess I'll say, I know one thing I'll just say about that is that, yeah, it's not limited. In fact, almost most white wines up until refrigeration were made with some kind of skin contact, whether you wanted it or not. And it's, I think really the entire wine world, why orange wine is interesting, is that it is like the journey of Josco Graubner. You know, Georgia is this touch point. It's not that we want you to come to Georgia and just like stay there.

It's the opposite. Georgians want you to come there, see what's possible, and then go back and dig deep into what was happening where you were, right? And bring that back, right? Because there, and so I think that's, you know, for us as an importer of Georgian wine, it's like what we want to see, and we know is starting to happen slowly. So that's why it's great to have these classes and to inspire people, because we want huge shelves of amber and Georgian wines. I mean, amber and orange wine and retailers. You know, that's what we want because we want to see that whole shelf filled with wines from every country that is making it in whatever way was authentic to them or they're rediscovering.

So because, just like you know, we touched on is that for a lot of times when we started this gig, you know, there was a lot of dogmatic people who would come to me and tell me in 2012 that you're like not selling real Georgian wine because it's not six months of skin contact. And I was like, very politely told them. Of course. That, yes, I understand where you're coming from, but you just read this one book and like that's just how it was said, right? But the truth is that this whole is a whole category wine. There's a whole spectrum. And inside of Georgia, and inside of every country, there's actually a spectrum and a place for orange wine. It's just been forgotten. And it happens to be the fact that Georgians didn't forget it.

And now we're rediscovering it, right? The other thing I wanted to say is that I wanted to talk a little bit more about Tevza and for the people that have had it there, just because we didn't touch a little bit on Chinuri, just also to kind of the comparison of how it looks in the glass is also a really kind of helpful thing for natural wine. This is, the Orgo is super clear. Obviously it's not fined, but it's slightly more clear. This is where you've taken when you take the wine out, you're mixing back in some of the musts. So it's less clarified in general. None are either of them fined or filtered? No, they're not fined. They'll do some very slight paper filtration in both of them just to not get seeds in the bottle, obviously.

But it’s not, when we say paper filtration, we’re usually talking about down to micron sizes is what people are doing with paper. But yeah, it’s been a very rudimentary filtering. But you know, Gogi, for example, Orgo, he’s never going to do a wine that has sediment or cloudiness in the bottle. Whereas Tevza, as it says on his label, it’s a little bit crazier. It’s a little bit more alive in that respect. It’s going to be, he’s less concerned about that. He’s more concerned about the taste. And you know, Chinori is a variety that I, like I said, it's lighter in body, even though this has four to five months of skin contact, almost the same amount of skin contact as the Monswanik, drastically less tannic. And that is varietal characteristics.

It's one of the biggest questions that we ask, people ask are like, what skin, what varieties are good for skin contact? What varieties are not good for skin contact? The real truth is like, it's not quite clear. You know what I mean? And there's a lot of people that are, and it's also not a clear-cut question. You know what I mean? I feel like you also can't treat skin contact as one variable. It's like how much skin contact, what kind of skin contact? Are we throwing stems and seeds? Are we throwing stems in the mix? Are we not throwing, yeah. When you picked it, you know, right? Like it's, so that's the thing is like, I want people to move past that and realize that if you're going for, if you're going for this style, you're going to, there are some choices that you're going to make that are going to influence how that wine comes out.

And it's not, that being said, there are some wines that I prefer, like some great varieties that I've tried that I prefer in the skin contact style. The question is, does it like black terroir and all that kind of stuff, whatever. But you know what I mean? I hope this, one of my hopes for our, you know, wine school listeners is that they, you know, begin to appreciate wine like any other great discipline, which is to say that like, if you pull up those threads, the more there is to discover. Right. The more you, you know, try to understand orange wine, the more you realize you don't know about it. Right. And you know, just that notion of living in the mystery of something and embracing the specificity of it, you know, I think is, is one of those things that, you know, as somebody that, that loves wine is, you know, something that you want to, you know, enforce on, on other people, you know, understand the locality, understand the uniqueness, understand the specialness of, of, of what goes into the, into the bottle. And I think the more you do that, you know, the, the more special your, you know, glass will, will be to you. Yeah. And that, that is, that kind of, what I wanted to say about the Château d'Yquem, which is like that too, is that this wine is not amber, you know? Yeah. It's neither is it orange and neither is it really yellow, even because, you know, there's a thing of yellow wine, which is basically after Chardonnay, but it, this, so that's, what's interesting about this whole category too, is that it's, it's not limited to, once you dig deeper, like you're talking about, you know, there's so much possibility.

And a lot of the wines, for example, from Imeretti and other things, they're not necessarily going to fit into that exact archetype that, you know, Cacchetti is going to give. And, but again, four or five months of skin contact, but why is it yellow? Well, this great variety, when the free juice is, is so clear, it's like vino verde, it's almost clear, almost greenish kind of tint when it's free run juice, when you're first pressing it. And this is what you get after four or five months of skin contact is that namely, there's just not much color to be taken out of. It's and so that's unique to the variety. Again, you could have a more oxidative style, which would bring, you know, we do have some wines like that on the market, but it's going to bring more color to it.

But this is a wine that basically has a lot of oxygen exposure, but it's not, you know, the micro-oxygenation isn't, isn't changing the color. Right. So there's a whole lot of spectrum of stuff. Yeah. I just wanted to bring that up as that acknowledgement, if anybody's wondering, you know, awesome, not quite an amber wine, you know, but it is in this. Yeah, no, I think that that's a great, a great segue. So Thompson, I'm going to; we're going to close things out here. So that your parents can get their dining room back among other things. But it should be said, I, I've enjoyed this conversation. Especially, in so far as it feels like we are just, you know, scratching the surface for the sake of this genre.

And, you know, obviously for the sake of Georgian wine, to begin with, and, you know, thank you all who have, you know, stayed tuned this long. Thank you all too. Thank you. Thank you to everyone who's purchased wine through, through our store. Thank you all who are purchasing remotely. We will, you know, try to give you the tools to access these wines wherever you happen to be purchasing. But, you know, we're, we're hugely grateful to have you in this virtual meeting house. And thank you so much, Mo. Thank you so much, Thompson. We love you guys. Love to all of you. Thank you so much.