Winery DuskCabernet Franc

Onwards, upwards. The roads get narrower, the corners get tighter. I step out of the car when I finally reach the winery and the air is so much fresher here. I go to take a sip from my water bottle and a gust of wind makes it whistle. I stand with Thomas Jullien and we look over the vineyards. It’s not yet spring, and the vines look little more than sticks. ‘It’s a lunar landscape at the moment,’ he says, as a friend’s flock of 300 sheep has just passed through to graze on every scrap of green b ...

Corriedale sheep snack on weeds among rows of vines; along the way, they fertilise the soil, adding nitrogen, phosphorus, and calcium. Owls and bats swoop from vineyard boxes from dusk ’til dawn, eliminating vine-root-eating gophers and grapevine moths. Native flowering plants create sanctuaries for beneficial insects. Such a menagerie of wildlife would have been unlikely decades ago. Still, the commitment to organic and biodynamic viticulture has pushed some California wine producers to l ...

I’d visited Kakheti, Kartli and Imereti before – Georgia’s dominant central wine-producing zones; but never the wild exterior. From the ice-crisped cemetery grass of the 11th-century church of St George, dominating the mountaintop village of Mravaldzali, we looked north across the mountains of the Greater Caucasus, Europe’s highest. The silence, and the vista, was daunting. Hundreds of dry, drab valleys lost themselves in as many snowy peaks. Russia lay beyond. There was, apparently, a way over: ...