Yes, Georgian wine is worth the hype and yes, you should...

The piala, set on the table before me, looks like the sort of receptacle you’d use for discarded olive pits. But Lisa Costa is pouring wine into it. Although the liquid streaming from the wine bottle is deep amber in color, this little clay bowl disguises its hue: Inside the ruddy-colored piala, the amber wine looks like water.

Give the wine a few minutes to acclimate, advises Costa. We’re sitting at the Punchdown, the Oakland wine bar she owns with partner DC Looney, and we’re tasting wines from the Republic of Georgia — in this case, Rkatsiteli (that’s the grape variety) from Babaneuris Marani (that’s the winery), a rusty-hued white wine that tastes uncannily like walnuts, black tea and dried apricots.

Sure enough, as I let it breathe in the piala, the Rkatsiteli grows softer. Its tannic grip eases. The smell of wet, clean, earthy clay grows a little stronger. Holding the piala with two hands and bringing it to my mouth, I begin to really, really understand the appeal of this whole Georgian wine thing.

The Punchdown was an early adopter of Georgian wine, serving it on its opening menu way back in 2010. Along with Jeff Berlin, wine director at Oakland’s A Cote, they form a small local contingent that’s been waving the red-and-white flag enthusiastically for about a decade, championing these strange, astringent, often quite funky wines without gaining much traction.

But suddenly, the true believers find themselves with lots of company. Alongside a growing interest in Georgian food (my colleague Soleil Ho can tell you all about that in her review on pages 6-7), new Bay Area restaurants like Bevri in Palo Alto and Noosh in S.F. are specializing in wine from the Eastern European country. The list at Dear Inga, the upcoming Mission District restaurant from the Nopa crew, will also lean heavily Georgian. In June, A Cote held a series of supras, Georgian-style feasts, complete with khinkali (soup dumplings), katmis satsivi (chicken in walnut sauce), copious jugs of amber wine and a traditional polyphonic choir. They all sold out.

After years of languishing in obscurity, Georgian wine has left the radical fringe and entered the foodie mainstream. And 2019 is the year that it has finally exploded in the Bay Area.

“It’s never been easier to sell Georgian wines,” says Chris Terrell, who launched his Georgia-focused import company in San Francisco in 2008. As of June, Georgian wine exports to the U.S. were up an astounding 88% percent over the previous year.

Why now? It’s clear to see why the time is right for Georgia to be having a moment. The country’s winemaking tradition manages to hit on every contemporary food-and-wine world buzzword: ancient, natural, authentic.

Georgia invented wine, as far as anyone can tell, with a history stretching back 8,000 years, and the techniques haven’t changed very much since then. Traditional Georgian winemakers still age their wines in large clay vessels called qvevri, which they bury underground. The white wines are fermented with their skins for months, resulting in powerful tannins and a dark amber color. “Orange wine” doesn’t begin to capture it. The grapes are indigenous varieties — Tsolikouri, Krakhuna, Mtsvane — rather than the bland-sounding, internationally recognizable Chardonnay or Merlot. The process is largely preindustrial, done without synthetic chemicals in the vineyard or the winery.

“It’s a combination of being new,” says Eric Danch, of the importer Danch & Granger Selections, “and also being 8,000 years old.”

In Georgia, “everyone’s grandmother or grandfather makes wine,” says Terrell. “You don’t really buy bottled wine there. You get it from a jug.” That home winemaking is not confined only to rural areas: High-rise apartment buildings in larger cities like Tbilisi have winemaking space in basements, where an American building might have a laundry room.

A large part of the recent Georgian wine boom is simply due to many of these home winemakers going commercial. Georgia has 100,000 small wine producers, estimates Julie Peterson, head of the U.S. chapter of Wines of Georgia, some of them aging wines in the same qvevri that have been in their families for hundreds of years.

The qvevri aging process is irresistibly enchanting. The large vessels, which can be as large as 1,000 liters, act as wombs — formed from clay, impregnated with grapes, submerged in the ground, then finally birthed. “It’s really a beautiful concept,” says Biondivino wine shop owner Ceri Smith, who opened a short-lived Georgian wine bar in Russian Hill called Et Al in 2012. “The vines grow from the earth, you put their fruit back in the earth, it reproduces, you drink it as wine. It’s a neverending cycle.” The grapevine cross is the central symbol of the Georgian Orthodox Church.

No wonder, then, that Georgia is such a prime beneficiary of the natural wine movement. Traditional Georgian winemaking is natural by default; it just never modernized. “We didn’t talk to producers within the framing of ‘natural wine,’” says Stephen Satterfield, founder of Whetstone magazine, which produced a documentary about Georgian food and wine in 2018. “It’s just as peculiar as it would be to talk to some farmer in a rural community in Europe that has no relationship to pesticides about the concept of organic.”

Unlike other global wine regions that are now “discovering” natural winemaking, Georgia’s traditional producers have the narrative advantage of being able to say, without any marketing agenda, that they’ve always done things this way. “Wines from these areas will not be successful in export unless they’re natural, because there’s no way to connect with the history if it’s not natural,” Terrell says.

Virtually all the Georgian wine you’ll find at these new Bay Area hot spots fall under this “traditional” umbrella: made with indigenous grapes, using natural methods, aged in qvevri. Yet this sort of winemaking accounts for a tiny fraction of all the wine made in Georgia (less than 1 percent, by some estimates), and only 25 percent of what’s imported to the U.S., according to Peterson.

In fact, the story of Georgian wine is the story of a people fighting to keep their traditions alive throughout hundreds of years of occupation by Ottoman, Persian and Soviet powers. It has not been easy.

Before 1921, when Georgia fell under control of the Soviet Union, more than 500 indigenous grape varieties flourished in the country. Under Soviet rule, that number dwindled to under 20. Industrial co-op wineries rose in eastern Georgia, charged with sating the Russian craving for sweet, high-alcohol wines. Many Georgian families saw their land seized or were forced to hand over their grapes during harvest.

The last three decades have been a gradual rebuilding of the wine culture that existed in the pre-Soviet era. That rebuilding accelerated after 2006, when Russia placed an embargo on all Georgian wines. Russia had accounted for 92 percent of Georgian wine exports at the time; the country now had to look westward for customers. And these new customers would not be as interested in that sweet, industrially produced plonk.

Although the eastern co-op wineries still dominate the Georgian wine industry, and Russia remains its top export market, the traditional practitioners have made a concerted, collective effort to restore the country’s former viticultural diversity. Many families have found rogue grapevines growing in the forest that they’re now harvesting — and propagating elsewhere, to restore some of the old varieties. John Wurdman, the American man who owns Pheasant’s Tears, the Georgian winery that’s best-known in the U.S., has planted a vineyard with 417 reclaimed indigenous varieties, which he ferments together as part of a field blend called Polyphony.

“Our real good fortune is that we live in a time where we get to experience these former Soviet and Ottoman states reclaiming their wine cultures,” says A Cote’s Berlin.

That reclamation process has had bumps in the road. As recently as a decade ago, sommeliers report that many Georgian wines they tasted were unsound, riddled with bacterial faults. “We had a few wines show up that looked like lava lamps,” says importer Danch. That has since improved immensely.

Even so, funk is a hallmark of many Georgian wines. Few of the traditional products taste squeaky-clean or look crystal clear. “On the spectrum of the kinds of wines that infuriate conventional winemakers, Georgia probably has the highest concentration of wines that would be looked at as f—ed up wines,” says Satterfield.

Where to drink Georgian wine in the Bay Area A Cote: 5478 College Ave., Oakland Bevri: 530 Bryant St., Palo Alto Dear Inga (opening fall 2019): 3560 18th St., S.F. Noosh: 2001 Fillmore St., S.F. The Punchdown: 1737 Broadway, Oakland Red Tavern: 2229 Clement St., S.F. A very brief glossary of Georgian wine terms Qvevri: The clay vessel used to age traditional Georgian wines. Only a handful of skilled craftsmen know how to make qvevri properly. Amber wine: White wine that ferments on its skins, known elsewhere as orange wine. “Orange” doesn’t really do justice to the deep hue of many of these Georgian creations, which often rest with their skins for as long as six months. Supra: The traditional Georgian feast. Featuring extremely large volumes of food and wine, and hours of celebratory toasts. Piala: This small clay bowl is the traditional drinking vessel for wine. Chinuri: A white grape variety grown in the central Kartli region that shares some hallmarks with Chenin Blanc. You’ll find it made as a traditional amber wine, but also as a light wine without skin contact (try the version from Iago’s Wine) and a pet-nat (look for Lapati). Mtsvane: A white grape variety widely planted in the country’s eastern Kakheti region that’s fruity, aromatic and a touch lighter than some of its counterparts. Saperavi: The most prevalent red grape variety, grown mostly in the Kakheti. Inky-dark in color (it is a teinturier, one of few grapes whose juice is red rather than clear) with thick skins, it can be reminiscent of Syrah. Rkatsiteli: A white grape variety, also common in the Kakheti, that makes compelling amber wines due to its propensity for retaining acidity.

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And that’s precisely the appeal, Satterfield says: “Those are the wines that taste like they came from the nonna’s backyard.”

Relinquishing the expectation of perfection is part of the Georgian wine drinking experience. That’s why you drink it out of the piala, rather than scrutinize it in a highly engineered Zalto glass. “It’s not something you’re supposed to pick apart,” says Looney, the Punchdown co-owner. “Wine is just part of the diet.”

Wine is so much a part of the diet, in fact, that it often seems to meld with the food. “The whole ‘if it grows together, it goes together’ mantra really holds up here,” says Berlin.

Flavors you’ll often find on Georgian tables — pomegranate, honeycomb, orange blossom, apricots, stinky cheese — appear over and over again in the country’s wines. And walnuts, most of all walnuts. “They put walnuts in everything,” says Costa, and sure enough, it’s hard not to find traces of tannic, buttery, slightly sweet nuttiness in your piala. Somehow, the tannins of walnuts in a dish find a harmony with the tannins in the amber wines. Each seems to soften the other.

Plenty of obstacles remain for Georgian wine in the U.S., and it’s not just that Rkatsiteli is hard to pronounce. Serving these bold, tannic wines without an overflowing plate of khachapuri (that cheesy bread boat) and mtsvadi (grilled pork skewers) can be challenging. They really need food.

Besides, the traditional winemaking practices will be nearly impossible to scale. Only a handful of experienced, trusted craftsmen exist who know how to make qvevris properly; the best ones have long waiting lists of winemakers. And if a winemaker does get her hands on more qvevri, will the wines made in different vessels taste consistent?

For Terrell, who has staked his career on Georgian wines, the question is not whether Georgia can grow and maintain quality. It’s whether the wines can find their audience. “Can Georgian wine go from this safe, natural-friendly incubator environment to the mainstream?” he asks.

Funky or not, the wines need to find a context in which they feel affordable and approachable to those outside of natural wine’s innermost circles. Otherwise, this 8,000-year tradition runs the risk of becoming a fad.

Esther Mobley is The San Francisco Chronicle’s wine critic. Email: emobley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Esther_mobley Instagram: @esthermob