By Prof. Giorgi Pkhakadze, MD, MPH, PhD · 15/09/2026
Racha is Georgia’s smallest and highest wine region — a valley of the Rioni river at 500 to 800 metres, ringed by the Caucasus, where the growing season is short and the grapes ripen late and slowly. From a strip of south-facing slopes around the village of Khvanchkara, west of Ambrolauri, comes the wine of the same name: a red, medium-bodied, with the sweetness of ripe raspberries and a clean, dry finish. It is made from two grapes found nowhere else, Alexandrouli and Mujuretuli, and it has been fought over for a century.
Why it is sweet
Not because sugar is added — the good ones have none. Racha’s autumns are cold: the grapes are picked in late October with high sugar, and when they are crushed into the qvevri the fermentation starts and then, as the cellar temperature drops towards winter, stops before all the sugar has turned to alcohol. The wine that results is around 11 per cent alcohol with a natural residual sweetness — semi-sweet by accident of climate, in a method the villages have used for centuries. In spring, if the cellar warms, the wine can start again; traditionally it was drunk young for that reason, and the sweetness was a feature of the place, not a style.
Stalin
The wine was known locally and no further until the 1900s, when the Kipiani family of Khvanchkara began bottling it and won a gold medal in Belgium in 1907. Then Stalin, a Georgian who knew his wines, made it the wine of the Kremlin. He served it at Yalta; the story that he sent cases to Churchill, who preferred it to the sweeter Kindzmarauli, is told in every Rachan cellar. Under the Soviet system it became a brand with a fixed recipe, and demand so far outstripped the few hectares of real vineyard that, for decades, most “Khvanchkara” sold in the USSR was something else with the label. That is the misunderstanding: many people who dislike Khvanchkara have never tasted it.
The real thing
Since Georgia protected the name in the 2000s, only wine from the designated villages and the two grapes may carry it, and a handful of family producers — the Kipianis among them, back on their land — make it properly. It is not a dessert wine: Rachans drink it with the local cooking, which is smoky and rich — lobiani bean pies, the region’s famous ham, shkmeruli chicken in garlic milk — and the sweetness cuts the fat. Try also the dry version of Alexandrouli, which the same families now make, and Tetra, Racha’s white, from the neighbouring gorge.
Visiting
Ambrolauri is four hours from Tbilisi and two from Kutaisi, through the gorge of the Rioni. The wineries are small, in villages, and open by arrangement; the tasting is at a family table with the ham and the bread. Nikortsminda, one of Georgia’s finest carved churches, is twenty minutes away, and Shaori lake above it.
See it with GTour
Two Khvanchkara cellars, Nikortsminda and the lakes are the Racha two-day tour, with a night in a Rachan guesthouse.
This story in Georgian — ქართულად: shenidasveneba.ge
ქართულად: ხვანჭკარა — ტკბილი წითელი, რომელიც სტალინმა ჩერჩილს გაუგზავნა
