National Geographic has published an article about winemaking culture and history in Georgia. 

"Meet Maka Kozhara: a wine expert. Young, intelligent, friendly.

Kozhara sits in an immense cellar in a muddy green valley in the Republic of Georgia. The cellar lies beneath an imitation French chateau. The vineyards outside, planted in gnarled rows, stretch away for miles. Once, in the late 19th century, the chateau’s owner, a Francophile, a vintner and eccentric Georgian aristocrat, pumped barrels of home-brewed champagne through a large outdoor fountain: a golden spray of drinkable bubbles shot into the air.

“It was for a party,” Kozhara says. “He loved wine.”

Kozhara twirls a glass of wine in her hand. She holds the glass up to the ceiling light. She is interrogating a local red—observing what physicists call the Gibbs-Maranoni Effect: How the surface tension of a liquid varies depending on its chemical make-up. It is a diagnostic tool. If small droplets of wine cling to the inside of a glass: the wine is dry, a high-alcohol vintage. If the wine drips sluggishly down the glass surface: a sweeter, less alcoholic nectar. Such faint dribbles are described, among connoisseurs, as the “legs” of a wine. But here in Georgia wines also possess legs of a different kind. Legs that travel. That conquer. That walk out of the Caucasus in the Bronze Age.

The taproots of Georgia’s wine are muscular and very old. They drill down to

the bedrock of time, into the deepest vaults of human memory. The earliest settled societies in the world—the empires of the Fertile Crescent, of Mesopotamia, of Egypt, and later of Greece and Rome—probably imported the secrets of viticulture from these remote valleys, these fields, these misty crags of Eurasia. Ancient Georgians famously brewed their wines in clay vats called kvevri. Today, these bulbous amphoras are still manufactured. Vintners still fill them with wine. The pots dot Georgia like gigantic dinosaur eggs. They are under farmers’ homes, in restaurants, in parks, in museums, outside gas stations. Kvevri are a symbol of Georgia: a source of pride, unity, strength. They deserve to appear on the national flag. It has been said that one reason why Georgians never converted en masse to Islam (the Arabs invaded the region in the seventh century) was because of their attachment to wine. Georgians refused to give up drinking.

Kozhara pours me a glass. It is her winery’s finest vintage, ink-dark, dense. The liquid shines in my hand. It exhales an aroma of earthy tannins. It is a scent that is deeply familiar, as old as civilization, that goes immediately to the head.

“Wine”—Kozhara declares flatly—“is our religion.”

To which the only possible response is: Amen."