Napareuli

Napareuli is one of the few villages where the whole chain of Georgian winemaking is visible in one place — vine to qvevri, qvevri to glass. It lies about twenty kilometres north of Telavi on the left bank of the Alazani, right under the Caucasus foothills.

The village name became an appellation. Napareuli denotes two controlled-origin wines: a dry red from Saperavi and a dry white from Rkatsiteli. The soils here are gravelly and free-draining, and cold air slides down off the mountains at night; that combination is what separates Napareuli fruit from the softer wines grown out on the plain.

Two things draw visitors:

• The qvevri museum, where cutaway sections show buried jars in place, alongside the tools and an explanation of how the clay vessels are coiled, fired and lined with beeswax — the same technology that has held wine here for six thousand years

• Working cellars, where tastings happen beside sealed qvevri in the ground rather than in a reception hall

The Georgian qvevri method was inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage in 2013. In Napareuli this is not a museum exhibit: buried qvevri sit in ordinary private courtyards, and in October the whole village is at the harvest.

Late September and October are a different visit altogether. Tractors come down the lanes loaded with grapes, gates stand open, and the smell of fermentation is in the air from one end of the village to the other. It is also the hardest time to get anyone's attention, because everyone is working.

The vineyards themselves reward a slow look. Rows here tend to run down towards the river rather than along the contour, and the older blocks are planted at wide spacing, a legacy of ploughing with oxen rather than tractors.