Do-Re-Mi Saperavi 2022

The Land

Do-Re-Mi's grapes come from three Georgian regions that disagree about stems. Kakheti, the traditional heart of the country's winemaking, ferments the fruit with skins and ripe stems together — the source of the deep, textured, tannic wines the region is known for. Kartli uses only part of the skins and keeps the stems out entirely, which yields something lighter and more refined. Imereti, in western Georgia, is cooler, and its grapes give fresh, aromatic wine with a lighter touch. The marani — the cellar — sits in the village of Ozhio, on the right bank of the Alazani River roughly ninety kilometers from Tbilisi, with the wall of the Greater Caucasus rising to the north. That valley is Saperavi country, and Saperavi is picked in October, in the second half of rtveli, the Georgian harvest, after the white grapes are already in.

The Wine

Saperavi is one of the world's few red-fleshed grapes: cut a berry open and the juice runs red rather than clear. The name means dye, and the wine behaves accordingly. Do-Re-Mi makes it in qvevri — handmade clay vessels running anywhere from 250 to 2,500 liters, buried to the neck in the cellar floor. Lightly pressed juice goes in with the skins and ferments on wild yeast alone, with no additives and no industrial yeast. When fermentation finishes the qvevri are sealed and covered over with soil until spring. Solids drift slowly to the bottom, clear wine rises to the top, and when the December and January cold kills off the remaining live yeast, the wine is moved to fresh qvevri to age on. Come spring it is poured at supra, the long ceremonial Georgian feast that anchors social life there; what survives the supra is what gets bottled. Nothing is fined or filtered and sulfites are held to a minimum. Expect what this grape gives in clay: opaque garnet shading to purple, black plum and blackberry and black cherry, a peppery savory edge, tannins with genuine grip, and the high natural acidity that lets Saperavi age for years rather than months.

The People

Do-Re-Mi was founded in 2014 by two friends, Giorgi Tsirghvava and Mamuka Tsiklauri, on a straightforward premise: make the best organic wine they could using the oldest Georgian methods available to them. Every vineyard they draw from is farmed organically and along local tradition, without synthetic pesticides. Nothing is added in the cellar, nothing is filtered or fined out, and the winery belongs to Georgia's natural wine association. The scale is small — the entire range is reported at around 20,000 bottles a year — and spans Rkatsiteli, Mtsvane, Kisi, Chinuri, Tavkveri and Saperavi, plus a second label called Ocho whose bottles carry endangered Georgian animals as a conservation gesture. It is worth keeping the timeline in mind. Grape pips found in Georgia have been dated to roughly eight thousand years ago, but small independent growers exporting natural qvevri wine under their own names is a phenomenon barely a generation old.

Food Pairing

Mtsvadi — pork skewered and grilled over dried grapevine cuttings — is the reference pairing, because the tannin has enough structure for charred fat and the acidity resets the palate between bites. Khinkali, the pleated dumplings full of spiced pork and beef and hot broth, work on the same logic: acid against richness, and the wine's black pepper meeting the pepper in the filling. Slow-roasted lamb shoulder with pomegranate and sumac gives the tannins the protein they are built for. And a rare ribeye, straight off high heat, is the shortest possible demonstration of why this grape has survived eight millennia. Serve it around sixty-two degrees. Saperavi was made for a table with too many dishes and too many toasts on it — open this for the dinner you expect to run long.