This is white wine made like red: Rkatsiteli fermented for months on its skins in the qvevri, the great beeswax-lined clay vessels buried to the neck in the cellar floor. The wine emerges deep amber and tannic, smelling of dried apricot, walnut and tea — a white with a red's architecture, made by a method as old as wine itself.
In Kakheti, Georgia's eastern wine heart, the method simply never stopped — not for empires, not for the Soviet planners who preferred steel and volume. When Western natural winemakers went looking for the roots of "orange wine" around 2000, they found them here, in farmhouse cellars where the eight-thousand-year habit had never been interrupted, and carried the buried-vessel idea back across Europe.