Orgo Saperavi

“The Eternity of the Sun, Living in a Bottle.” – sounds like a self-aggrandizing note to be putting on your own bottle of wine. Yet on the other hand, maybe Orgo’s self-aggrandizement is justified. They are, after all, one of the modern leaders in Georgian wine and specifically the Saperavi grape. Theirs is a showcase to the rest of the world an 8,000-year-old tradition of making wine, the longest in human history.

Of course, this would be meaningless if this wine were funky, or weird, or just plain boring. Just being from a weird place, or being from the leader of histories oldest winemaking tradition doesn’t neccessairly mean that your making great wine. So if I back up a bit, what I can tell you is that to my palate, this is incredibly delicious wine:

The wine opens with a beautiful expression of black currant, cherries, cassis, juniper, dark chocolate and notes of leather. On the palate there is a beautiful palace of fruit and spice, with full integrated tannins. The result is a wine of finesse and elegance, a joy to drink now. And while I would love to say it will age longer, I have no experience whatsoever in aged Saperavi! But I will say this – if I had tasted it blind I would have guessed it was Cabernet. The black fruit, the spice, the tannin structure all remind me of Cabernet.

Orgo, as a winery, does actually have a little bit of shine to it, even if that shine is over 9000 miles from Milwaukee. The winemakers, Gogi Dikishivili and his son Temur Dakishvili, are two of Georgia’s hottest consulting winemakers. Pioneering traditional varieties and ancient techniques, including the using Qvervi – large clay pots for fermenting, Gogi and his son make singularly unique wines that add their own elegance and refinement to the 8,000-year-old Georgian winemaking tradition. Orgo is their old-vine personal project, bringing you what I think is one of the world’s best Saperavi.

And that is not a joke. You can imagine that once upon a time, Italian Super-Tuscans were absolutely disrespected (if known at all), as was Washington State Cabernet. Austrian Gruner Veltliner was an unpronounceable mystery. But in the wine world, treasures come to those willing to explore. So yes, Georgia and Saperavi are unknown to you (and just barely known to me) but I believe this is a darn good, world-class bottle of wine. So here is to wonderful drinking! გაუმარჯოს!