How to Chose Georgian Wine from gvino UK
by Danilo Di Salvo, co-founder, gvino UK
With an ever growing wine list at gvino UK, we commonly get asked about choosing the right Georgian wine. Well, over the summer we have developed a useful tool that can help you get that all important decision right!
#1 What’s the problem?
Georgia has over 500 indigenous grape varieties, which almost a fifth of all grape varieties throughout the world. When you consider that Georgia is roughly the same size as England then that is a rather incredible statistic. Some of these grapes are starting to get more international recognition, such as the Saperavi grape. That still leaves many grape varieties that are less known in the UK. As such, the familiarity that we all feel with say a Rioja or a Cab Sav is a little further away with Georgian varieties. When you mix in Qvevri with lesser known varieties then it can be quite confusing to chose the right wine for you.
#2 What did we do?
We sat down together and talked about the questions that we most often are asked when helping to choose a wine. We have seen that people more familiar with Georgian grape varieties are often interested not only in the grape but also with where it was grown in Georgia. For Georgian wine new comers, we often are asked about the flavour of different wines. Therefore, after chatting with our winemakers we came up with seven key elements for each wine:
1) Region (where were the grapes grown?)
2) Grape (what grape(s) are in each wine?)
3) Style (what colour is the wine?)
4) Fermentation Vessel (to qvevri or not to qvevri?)
5) Taste (what is the overall characteristic of the wine?)
6) Nose (what aromas come from this wine?)
7) Palate (what are the key flavour associated with the wine?)
#3 How does it work?
We worked with our website developers to make this as simple as possible. Visit our shop here (a new window will pop up) and if you are on mobile (or small tablet) then your options will appear at the top of the page. On a desktop, your options will be displayed on the left hand side. By default, all of these options are minimised, so to expand out an element click on the “+” sign. Then simply click on a word in any of the options list to filter using this variable. To unselect any selected variable then click on the activated word again. You can select as many options as you like. “Grape”, “Nose” and “Palate” use “AND” Boolean logic, whereas the all of the others use “OR” Boolean logic. Selecting different elements from different options will invoke “AND” logic.
#4 Let’s go through an example…
So, today I fancy a nice white wine. So, let’s go to the shop… Let’s expand “Style” by clicking the “+” sign, and then we will select white wines by clicking “White”. We have some beautiful semi sweet whites, but today, I feel like something dry. So, let’s expand “Taste” and click “Dry”. We have a couple of wines ready for selection but let’s drill down to that perfect wine. Under “Nose”, I will click onnnn… erm…, how about “Apricot” and under “Palate”, I want something with a little citrus for my roast chicken so I will click on “Cirtus”. We now have the perfect wine selected: Baia’s wonderful Tsitska Tsolikouri Krakhuna.
This exact search can be found here.
Now, it’s over to you – can you find your perfect Georgian wine?
#5 What else is happening at gvino UK?
We have lots of exciting things lined up over the coming months. We have just signed up for a very exciting project with a Georgian filmmaker – more to be announced soon! Closer to home, we will be at the Oxford Wine Festival on the 10th and 11th of September. We can’t wait for this – it’s one of our favourite wine fests. This year will be special!
