Chris BerryFounder, Wine Underdogs — chasing the world’s overlooked grapesGeorgia invented wine eight thousand years ago. Then, somewhere along the way, it learned to freeze it.
That sentence shouldn't quite work. Georgia is the country of the qvevri — the buried clay egg, the amber wine, the tradition UNESCO blessed in 2013 and the archaeologists keep dating older every time they dig. Icewine belongs to colder, newer places: the Rhine, the Niagara escarpment, a German accident from the late 1700s. So a Georgian icewine is a small act of defiance — the oldest cellar on earth borrowing a trick from the new world and, characteristically, doing it on its own terms.
KGM — Kakhuri Gvinis Marani, out of the Telavi appellation in Kakheti, the country's red-wine heartland — makes this one. The fruit is harvested after the first snow, then pressed while frozen so the water stays behind as ice and only the dense, sweet essence runs out. You get very little wine for a great deal of fruit, which explains the bottle and my one real grievance with it.
Here's the quiet twist: it's a white sweet wine made from Cabernet Sauvignon — a red grape, pressed pale before its skins could lend a drop of color. The result glimmers amber in the glass, with ripe yellow fruit, citrus, and honey, and not a trace of the dark berry you'd expect from the name. It is, in one bottle, two upendings of what you thought you knew: a frozen wine from a warm cellar's homeland, and a white wine from a red grape.
And it is, simply, balanced. Sweet, yes — but it knows when to stop. That restraint is the whole game with dessert wine; it's the line between something you admire on the shelf and something you actually finish. There's none of the cloying, syrupy weight that sinks the lesser sweet wines. It carries its sugar the way a good host carries a strong opinion: confidently, and without making the entire evening about it.
My only complaint is volume. The bottle is 375 millilitres — a half measure — and you want more, which is either a marketing decision or a small cruelty, and at icewine prices, probably both.
The larger point is the one this site keeps making. The famous wine countries are easy to admire from a distance. The interesting ones surprise you: they take a style you thought you understood and quietly prove you didn't know its full range. Georgia has been doing exactly that for eight millennia. It does not appear to be finished.
Tasting Review
Kakhuri Gvinis Marani KGM Icewine
Cabernet Sauvignon (white-pressed) · Telavi, Kakheti, Georgia · NV
Glimmering amber. Ripe yellow fruit, citrus, and honey, with dense concentration but no cloy — sweet that knows when to stop. The only flaw is the 375ml half-bottle, which leaves you wanting another pour.
New to Georgian wine? Start with the country itself: Georgia, the cradle of wine.