Saperavi

Saperavi is Georgia's great red grape and one of the few varieties in the world with red flesh as well as red skin. Almost every other red grape has colourless pulp, so colour comes only from skin contact; Saperavi is a teinturier, and its juice runs dark from the moment the berry is crushed. The name means dye, which is exactly right.

The wines are correspondingly black — genuinely opaque, staining the glass — with high acidity, substantial tannin and dark fruit: blackcurrant, damson, black cherry, over notes of liquorice, tobacco and iron. Alcohol is usually generous, and the combination of acid and tannin gives the wine real ageing capacity, well beyond what most Eastern European reds manage.

It is grown throughout Georgia but is at its best in Kakheti, particularly on the alluvial soils of the Alazani valley. Two winemaking traditions run in parallel. The European method uses steel and oak and produces something a Bordeaux drinker would recognise. The Georgian method uses the buried clay qvevri, fermenting on skins and stems for months, which yields a wine of formidable structure and a savoury, earthy, slightly wild character.

It is also the base for Kindzmarauli and the other semi-sweet reds of the region, where fermentation is halted with residual sugar remaining — a style that was enormously popular in the Soviet Union and remains so across the former republics.

Cold-hardiness has taken it well beyond Georgia: there are plantings in Ukraine, Moldova, Australia and New York State, where it survives winters that would kill most European vines.