The Clay That Remembers: On the Last Qvevri-Makers of Georgia

The smell hits you first. Red clay dust—dry, mineral, faintly sweet—and beneath it, the ghost of woodsmoke still clinging to the stone walls of the workshop. This is Shrosha, a village fifty kilometres southeast of Kutaisi in the Imereti region of Georgia, and it smells like the inside of a memory.

A man is working with his hands in the corner. He doesn't look up.

The Word Before the Wine

Before we get to the wine—and we will get to the wine—we need to sit with the vessel.

The locals call it a qvevri. The word comes from kveuri, which means, roughly, "that which is buried" or "something dug deep in the ground." It is an egg-shaped clay pot, narrow at the bottom and wide at the mouth, and it has been used to ferment and store wine in the Caucasus for at least eight thousand years. The oldest known qvevri, unearthed in a Neolithic settlement in eastern Georgia in 2015, dates to 6000 BCE. For context: that predates the wheel. It predates writing. A Georgian family was burying clay pots in the earth to make wine before there was a word written anywhere that we can still read.

The shape is deliberate. Buried in the ground, the qvevri is held at a constant temperature of twelve to fifteen degrees Celsius—cool enough to let wild yeasts do their quiet, ancient work. Nothing is added, nothing adjusted, nothing engineered. The earth itself is the temperature control. When you drink a glass of Rkatsiteli made in a qvevri, you are drinking something that has been held, quite literally, in the body of the planet.

UNESCO recognized this in 2013, adding the "Ancient Georgian Traditional Qvevri Wine-Making Method" to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage. In 2021, the qvevri itself—the vessel, not just the method—received Protected Geographical Indication status. It is the first non-food item ever added to Georgia's State Register of Appellations of Origin. They gave a pot a passport. Because some pots deserve one.

The Man Who Knows by Touch

His name is Sergo Bozhadze. He is the fifth generation of his family to make qvevri in Shrosha, and he works in the same home-studio as his father, Zaliko, whose name people in this region say with a particular softness, the way you say the name of someone you are grateful exists.

There is no recipe for the clay. Sergo uses two types of red clay from a quarry thirty kilometres away, blended with pure water. When he was asked once what the ratio was, he said he didn't know. He knows it by touch. He has been knowing it by touch since he was old enough to hold a handful of earth.

The method is something close to coil pottery—strips of clay built upward, layer by layer, in a widening spiral. Only fifteen to twenty centimetres can be added in a single day. Then you wait twenty-four hours for that layer to harden before adding the next. A single qvevri can take weeks to build. Sizes range from twenty litres to ten thousand litres; the most common hold around eight hundred. These are not small objects. They are the size of a person.

The firing takes ten days. Wood only. Temperatures reaching the equivalent of five hundred degrees Celsius. "The fire talks to you," one qvevri maker once said. I wrote that down in my Moleskine and underlined it three times. The fire talks to you. It tells you when to add more wood, when to let it breathe, when the clay has taken the heat it needs. You can only hear this if you have been listening for years.

After firing, while the vessel is still hot, the inside is coated with beeswax. This seals the pores, shapes the micro-environment in which the wine will eventually breathe. Every qvevri in Georgia carries this smell—warm clay, warm wax, time.

What the Soviets Almost Took

This is where the story gets harder.

For seven decades, under Soviet occupation, the making of qvevri at home was forbidden. The state nationalized the craft, herded the makers into factories, turned a practice of intimate, generational knowledge into an industrial output. If an artisan family was found making qvevri privately, the pots were destroyed.

Some families did not accept this. They kept making them anyway—secretly, slowly, at personal risk. A form of cultural resistance so quiet that it left no record except in the hands that continued.

When Georgia regained independence in 1991, there were almost no independent qvevri makers left. Zaza Kbilashvili, another master craftsman who survived this period, describes his family as "one of only three remaining private qvevri businesses" to emerge from seven decades of suppression. His urgency, when he speaks about preservation, is not abstract. He has already seen what disappearance looks like. He has already watched most of the craft vanish. "We must preserve our qvevri-making tradition. If we do not want the qvevri to disappear, we can't lose the tradition of qvevri making."

Today there are four qvevri makers in all of Georgia. Four. In a country where eight thousand years of winemaking culture depends on the existence of this vessel. The craft clings to a handful of villages—Shrosha and Tkemlovana in Imereti, Vardisubani in Kakheti, Atsana in Guria. No formal school teaches it. Knowledge passes from father to son, in workshops that smell of red clay and woodsmoke, by touch.

The Marani

Inside every Georgian home that makes wine—and for most of the country's history, this has meant most homes—there is a room called the marani. The word translates roughly to "wine cellar," but that translation loses everything that matters.

The marani is where the qvevri live, their rims flush with the floor, the rest of them submerged beneath. It is where the harvest comes in the autumn and where the new wine sleeps through the winter. It is also, historically, a place of ritual—during periods of religious persecution, when churches were inaccessible, the marani served for baptisms and wedding ceremonies. The cellar became the altar. The vessel became the sacred.

Georgians describe the marani as the holiest place in the family home. When someone says that about a room that contains fermented grape juice, you have to understand: they are not speaking metaphorically.

Rtveli: The Harvest That Belongs to Everyone

The word rtveli comes from stveli, meaning "fruit harvest." Over centuries, the "s" softened to "r," the word narrowed to mean specifically the grape harvest. Every October, when the air grows crisp and the skins of the grapes begin to thicken, Georgian families gather across the country to bring in the harvest together.

We picked in the early morning. The sun was low and the dew was still on the vines and the bunches were cold in your hands, heavy with sugar. There is a rule: grapes picked in the morning must be pressed the same day. Nothing is left to sit. The immediacy is part of the discipline.

The pressing is done with feet—the traditional tool called a satsnakheli, made of wood or stone or clay. Even now, when mechanical presses are available, many families insist on foot pressing. The reason is precise: feet apply exactly the right pressure to extract juice without bursting the seeds. The unbroken seeds mean the wine won't turn tannic and bitter. Human feet, calibrated over thousands of years, are the perfect instrument.

The whole process is social in a way that resists description. Singing—specifically, Georgian polyphonic choral singing, a three-voice tradition that UNESCO also recognizes as Intangible Heritage—moves through the vineyard like a second kind of harvest. Children run between the rows. Grandmothers supervise the pressing with the authority of people who have been supervising it for sixty years and intend to supervise it for at least sixty more. Food appears at the edges. Wine from last year's qvevri circulates in clay cups.

The wine that is pressed at rtveli becomes machari—new wine, fermenting wine, a wine that is still becoming itself. For weeks after the harvest, the winemaker stirs the must several times a day, keeping the fermenting juice and skins in constant contact. Then the qvevri is sealed. Then it waits.

Spring: The Opening

The most emotional moment in the Georgian wine year is not the harvest. It is spring.

In March or April, when the cold lifts, the family gathers at the marani. The clay lid of the qvevri is lifted for the first time. From the darkness below ground—from six months of cold and fermentation and time—rises a perfume of wild honey, damp stone, and ripe fruit. Amber-colored wine, made from white grapes left on their skins for months, pours out cloudy at first, then clearing. The color is the color of wildflower honey held up to a winter window.

The whites—Rkatsiteli, Kisi, Mtsvane—carry notes of dried apricot, walnut, and crushed herb. The reds, particularly Saperavi, run ink-dark and carry a minerality that people describe as limestone and mountain fog. These are not wines that taste like anything you have tasted before. They are wines that taste like place—like a specific combination of soil, altitude, clay, and time that exists nowhere else on earth.

This is the moment that the winemaker has been waiting for since October. The most emotional moment is simply: how good did it turn out?

Gaumarjos

The Georgian toast is Gaumarjos (გაუმარჯოს). It means, literally, "to victory." Not the victory of conquest, but the older meaning—the victory of survival, of the living person, of the good harvest. You say it and you drink, but only after the tamada—the toastmaster, a role depicted in a bronze statue found in western Georgia dating to the seventh century—leads the table through the proper sequence.

The first rule of a supra, the traditional Georgian feast, is this: no one drinks until the tamada toasts.

The second rule, unwritten but understood, is that you are not just drinking wine. You are drinking a decision that someone made six months ago about what kind of person they wanted to be: patient, unhurried, trusting in the slow work of clay and yeast and cold ground. You are drinking a social institution older than any country currently on a map. You are drinking something that survived suppression, industrialization, and the disinterest of the modern world, because a handful of people in a few small villages kept knowing how to do it by touch.

Gaumarjos.

What I Am Doing in This Room

I want to be transparent about something, because I think it matters.

I am a Canadian man with a Moleskine notebook and a press pass from a decade ago, sitting in a village in the Caucasus that has no particular need for my presence. The Bozhadze family did not ask me to come. The marani does not require my observation. The wine will be made without me.

What I can offer—the only honest thing I can offer—is attention. Sustained, unhurried, unprofitable attention to the fact that something extraordinary is happening in a room that most of the world will never enter.

The qvevri makers of Georgia are not waiting to be discovered. They are not "hidden gems" (a phrase I find genuinely offensive, because people who live and work in a place are not gems, and their home is not hidden from them). They are craftsmen doing work they love, in a tradition they inherited, for a culture that needs it.

My being here changes the room a little. I know that. The camera on the table between us—which I haven't touched yet; we've been talking for half an hour—changes things. The only way to honor that is to say it plainly.

What You Can Do

If this landed somewhere in you—if the image of a man knowing ratios by touch, or wine waiting through a Georgian winter in a clay pot sealed with beeswax, struck you as something worth preserving—there are small things.

Seek out Georgian qvevri wine from small producers. The major wine regions are Kakheti (most of the country's production), Imereti, and Racha. Look for Rkatsiteli, Mtsvane, or Kisi for amber wine; Saperavi for red. When you buy from a boutique family winery rather than an industrial producer, you are contributing to the economic ecosystem that keeps these traditions alive. You are buying the soup. You are paying for the time.

The UNESCO listing matters but it is not enough. Recognition without economic reciprocity is just admiration from a distance.

Stay curious, stay humble.