Our big visit this afternoon was to the Mosmieri Winery. It was a short drive from Telavi, through mostly vineyard country. This is the Kakheti wine region. Georgia has been making wines for over 8,000 years. This winery has 42 acres of grapes, and they produce three varieties of wine. They said that Georgia has 525 varieties of grapes, but most are wild grapes. Georgians produce wine from 28 varieties of grapes. They make most of their wines the 'regular' way, but they do produce some of their wines the "Georgian way." Mosmieri produces about 15,000 cases of wine per year.

The Georgian way of wine making is to bury the qvevri (large clay vessels) in the ground. Qvevri are 500-800 gallon, egg-shaped clay vessels. The only entrance for the Georgian way is from the top of the pots, so all the work must be done from above. The qvevri are about six to seven feet tall, or deep when working from above. They make dry wines including an Amber wine, which is not red, white, or rose'.

You can see some of their vineyard and get a sense of their location in the first photo. Next are their Georgian wine tubs, in the ground.

They also have modern temperature-controlled stainless-steel tanks and age their regular wines in French oak barrels, from Burgundy France.

They have multiple locations for tasting and dining and the main restaurant area was very nice, as you can see. We ate outside on the veranda which is to the left of the photo below.

We had lunch and wine tasting and everything was very nice. Lunch was beets and cheese, tomatoes and cheese, Dolma, BBQ pork, potatoes, breads, and grape juice and walnut fruit leather with tea for dessert.

We tasted three wines plus some Cha Cha, which was like Grappa. I was not familiar with any of the grape varieties. We were served one Amber wine. They said that the wine world now recognizes their Amber wines as a 4th type of wine: reds, whites, rose', and now amber.