Iago Chinuri 2023

Written By Campbell Mattinson
Bottle of Iago Chinuri 2023.

Iago Chinuri 2023
13% alcohol, cork, Kartli/Georgia.

This chinuri – made by benchmark Georgian producer Iago Bitarishvili – spent seven months on skins in (buried) qvevri. Iago customarily ages his chinuri on skins for 5-6 months but he deemed that 2023 required longer. It was grown and made organically.

It’s a full amber colour without being dark or cola-like. It’s wild with orange rind, honey, peach, spice and stone characters, and shows some positive reduction. It’s also meaty, peaty, and smoky, though it gets fresher and (the palate extends) longer as it rests in the glass. I tasted this alongside Iago’s no-skin-contact 2024 Chinuri, and if following the script I’d have this amber release from 2023 ahead of that wine. But I didn’t; I preferred the release sans skin contact, courtesy of its sheer intensity of flavour, which I suspect is a vintage thing. That said, I still scribbled 93-94 points beside this wine, so I still think that the quality of this 2023 Iago Chinuri is exemplary.

Campbell Mattinson

This article was written by Campbell Mattinson, founder of The Winefront and mattinson, and former chief editor of Halliday.

When you pick up a wine book and see thousands of top-scoring wines, it’s hard to know which wine to choose. Mattinson guides you through this maze, giving you an honest view of the best Australian wines, the best wine stories, the best wine producers, the best value wines and simply, the best tasting wines. Importantly, Mattinson will tell you about the top-rated wines and also about the underrated wines. In short, Mattinson knows Australian wines inside and out.

Mattinson has been a photo-journalist since 1987. For the past 25 years he’s been a voice that you can trust when you’re looking for the best wines. He’s the only Australian to have won the Australian Wine Communicator of the Year Award more than once. He’s a past winner of a Louis Roederer International Wine Media Award, and is the author of the award-winning book The Wine Hunter. He’s not afraid to put a score beside a wine. But what he’d rather do, is tell you the wine’s story.

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Iago Chinuri 2024