The first time I tasted a real Georgian amber wine, I was sitting on a stone terrace in Sighnaghi, the tiny hilltop town they call the City of Love, watching the Alazani Valley dissolve into a lilac dusk. John Wurdeman — the American painter who fell so hard for Georgia he never left — poured me a glass of his Pheasant's Tears Rkatsiteli, and it arrived the colour of raw honey. It smelled of bruised apricot, beeswax, and something older — something geological. I remember thinking: this is not wine as I understand it. This is wine as it was before anyone decided what wine should be.
That was 2014. A decade later, a version of that same liquid sits on virtually every natural wine list in Brooklyn, poured by sommeliers in vintage denim who speak of qvevri the way an earlier generation spoke of barriques. The orange wine revolution is real, it is accelerating, and its roots reach back eight millennia into the red clay of the South Caucasus.
The Oldest New Thing in Wine
Georgia's claim to being the cradle of viticulture is not romantic folklore — it is archaeology. In 2017, a team led by Patrick McGovern of the University of Pennsylvania's Biomolecular Archaeology Laboratory identified tartaric acid residues on pottery fragments unearthed at Gadachrili Gora, south of Tbilisi, dating to roughly 6000 BC. Georgians had been fermenting grape juice in earthenware vessels — qvevri — for at least eight thousand years, burying the egg-shaped clay pots in the ground to maintain temperature, leaving the crushed white grapes in extended contact with their skins, seeds, and stems for months at a time. The result was not white wine. It was not rosé. It was something deeper, tawnier, tannic in a way that white wine is not supposed to be. In 2013, UNESCO inscribed Georgia's qvevri winemaking method on its Intangible Cultural Heritage list, an acknowledgement that this was not merely a technique but a living tradition.
For most of the twentieth century, that tradition survived in pockets — family cellars in Kakheti, monastery vineyards in Alaverdi — while Soviet collectivisation and industrial winemaking nearly buried it. The revival began not in Georgia but in Friuli, on the Slovenian border, where a brooding, restless winemaker named Josko Gravner made a pilgrimage to Kakheti in the late 1990s. What he found changed him. He returned to his estate in Oslavia, ripped out his stainless steel tanks, imported Georgian qvevri, and began making white wines with months of skin contact. His neighbours — Stanko Radikon, Dario Prinčič — followed. The wines were polarising: cloudy, tannic, amber-hued, absolutely unlike anything Friuli was known for. Critics were baffled. Importers were intrigued.
From Oslavia to Williamsburg
The term 'orange wine' itself is a relatively recent coinage, attributed to the British wine writer and importer David A. Harvey, who reportedly used it around 2004 to give English-speaking drinkers a handle on this unfamiliar category. It stuck, despite the objections of purists who preferred 'amber' or 'skin-contact white.' Whatever you called it, by the early 2010s, orange wine had found its spiritual American home in the natural wine bars sprouting across Brooklyn.
At The Four Horsemen in Williamsburg — the restaurant opened by LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy and wine director Justin Chearno — Georgian and Friulian skin-contact wines appeared on the list from day one in 2015. Down the road, June Wine Bar in Cobble Hill built a following around obscure, textured bottles that rewarded curiosity. Suddenly, Rkatsiteli was a word Brooklyn bartenders could pronounce. Mtsvane appeared on chalkboards next to lo-fi illustrations of amphorae. A wine that had survived Soviet suppression and Western indifference had become, improbably, cool.
But coolness alone does not explain the staying power. What orange wine offers is something the modern drinker increasingly craves: texture. In a world saturated with crisp, clean, inoffensive Pinot Grigio, a glass of skin-contact Kisi from Kakheti feels almost radical — its grip on the palate, its savoury depth, its refusal to behave like a white wine or a red. It occupies a genuinely different sensory space, and for a generation of drinkers raised on craft beer and fermented everything, that space feels like home.
The Road Ahead — Clay, Concrete, and Conviction
Today, the movement has outgrown its origins. Winemakers in Slovenia, Austria, Australia, and South Africa are experimenting with extended skin contact. In the Finger Lakes, Bloomer Creek's Kim Engle has been quietly making exceptional orange wines from Cayuga White grapes. In Georgia itself, a new generation of producers — Nika Bakhia's Lapati Wines, the women-led collective Qvevri Wine Cellar — are reclaiming the tradition on their own terms, balancing reverence for the old methods with a willingness to push boundaries.
Back in Brooklyn, the orange wine shelf at Chambers Street Wines in Manhattan — still the city's most serious natural wine shop — has tripled in the last five years. Co-owner David Lillie told me recently that demand shows no sign of plateauing. 'People who come in asking for orange wine aren't just chasing a trend,' he said. 'They've tasted something that moved them, and they want to understand it.'
Understanding, of course, is a journey — one that begins in the present tense of a glass but leads inexorably backward, through Friulian cellars and Soviet neglect and monastery vineyards, to a clay vessel buried in Georgian earth before the invention of the wheel. That is the quiet miracle of orange wine. It is not new. It was never new. It simply waited, with the patience of clay, for the world to catch up.
