By Prof. Giorgi Pkhakadze, MD, MPH, PhD · 15/09/2026
Somewhere in the first hour of a Kakheti wine tour, a glass arrives that does not look like white wine. It is deep gold, or copper, or the colour of strong tea, and it smells of walnut skins, apricot, honey and something like a cellar. Most visitors pause. This is amber wine — karvisperi — and it is the reason wine people from Paris to Tokyo now fly to Kakheti.
What makes it amber
Every white grape has colour in its skin; the winemaker usually removes the skins before fermentation to keep the juice pale. In the qvevri tradition the skins stay in — for the whole fermentation and often for months afterwards, buried in clay underground. The wine takes colour and tannin from the skins the way a red does. It is, in effect, a white grape made like a red wine. The result is dry, structured, slightly grippy in the mouth, and unlike anything from a stainless-steel tank.
The grapes
Rkatsiteli is the backbone — Kakheti’s everyday white, planted everywhere, nutty and firm in the qvevri. Kisi is rarer and more aromatic, with dried apricot and a floral edge. Mtsvane is greener and fresher. Khikhvi is the one the winemaker keeps for guests he likes. Many family wines are field blends of two or three of these, picked and pressed together, which is how it was done before anyone labelled anything.
How to taste it
Forget the rules for white wine. Serve it cool, not cold — 12 to 14 degrees; ice kills it. Use a normal glass, not a narrow one; it needs air. Expect tannin: the slight dryness on the gums is meant to be there. And eat with it — amber wine was designed for the Georgian table, and it comes alive beside walnut sauces, roast chicken, cheese, aubergine, and the fatty lamb of a supra. On its own it can seem austere; with food it is one of the most versatile wines in the world.
A good winemaker will pour you the same grape from two qvevri or two years, and the difference — one softer, one sharper, one with more skin time — is the whole lesson in a minute.
Where it went
Amber wine nearly vanished in the Soviet era, when the state wanted volume and steel. Families kept it alive in their own cellars. Since about 2005 a generation of small Kakhetian producers has taken it back to the world; Georgian amber wines are now on the lists of serious restaurants in London, New York and Copenhagen, and “orange wine” everywhere else is a distant cousin of what is made here.
See it with GTour
The Kakheti wine country day includes tastings at two very different cellars; the Telavi & Kakheti day adds the Tsinandali estate; and the three-day Grand Wine tour is five wineries and two nights among the vines.
ქართულად: ქარვისფერი ღვინო — ერთ ჭიქაში ახსნილი
