Teliani Valley winery, Soviet-era offices
Now that’s a Soviet-era building.
Teliani Valley, Telavi, Kakheti. Two winemakers who’d worked in the Soviet state factories started this in 1997 with borrowed equipment, and the office block still looks the part – long, rendered, austere, a line of flagpoles with nothing flying. Behind it is one of the most modern cellars in Georgia and the first winery in the country to win Decanter’s Best in Show two years running.
Teliani Valley, Telavi, Kakheti. The company was founded in 1997 by two winemakers who had worked in the Soviet state wine factories; they started with equipment borrowed from the old state-run winery and built the business on the site of a 19th-century winery in Tsinandali, beside the Teliani vineyards. The first vintage was released in 2000. It bought no vineyards of its own until 2005 – until then it worked entirely with purchased fruit.
It’s now one of Georgia’s larger producers, making more than two million bottles a year, and one of its most decorated – the first Georgian winery to take Best in Show at the Decanter World Wine Awards in consecutive years (2019 and 2020), both with single-variety qvevri wines, a Kisi and a Rkatsiteli, each scoring 97. Native varieties are the focus: Saperavi, Rkatsiteli, Mtsvane, Kisi, Chinuri, Tsolikouri. The cellar is modern; the wines are split between qvevri and conventional “classical” methods. It has had the longest run on the American market of any Georgian winery and opened a Berlin office in 2021.
Your photograph makes the point well: the architecture is pure late-Soviet institutional – long, low, rendered, a row of air-conditioners bolted on, the flagpoles bare. The winery behind it is a different century.
