There is a place in the South Caucasus, roughly the size of West Virginia, where people have been making wine for eight thousand years — burying clay vessels underground for safekeeping, hiding vines from conquering armies, teaching viticulture alongside theology in mountain monasteries. Not as a hobby. Not as a craft revival. As identity. As a form of survival so stubborn it outlasted every empire that tried to take it away.
That place is Georgia. And this July, SOMM TV is releasing Echoes of Wine — a new documentary that travels through its vineyards, cellars, and family estates to ask the question that matters most right now, as the global wine world turns toward authenticity and a desire to drink something that actually means something: why did it take us this long to pay attention?
A Place That Gets Under Your Skin
“I came here expecting to make a film about history,” says Jason Wise, SOMM TV’s director and the creative force behind the original SOMM films. “What I found was a place where history is just what they call Tuesday.” Wise returned to Georgia after filming wrapped and is already planning another visit before the end of the year. “Most places you go, you feel like you’ve gotten what you came for. Georgia keeps opening. You finish one conversation and it leads to three more. There’s something about the scale of it — this country is smaller than most American states — and yet it contains more winemaking depth per square mile than almost anywhere I’ve ever been.”
The team moved through Kartli and Kakheti — Georgia’s two great wine heartlands — meeting winemakers of every kind: eleventh-generation families still working the same land; younger producers rethinking the wines their grandparents grew up drinking; natural winemakers who treat harmony with the earth not as philosophy but as technique; one producer who has devoted himself entirely to a single grape variety and pours the only argument you’ll ever need; and a non-Georgian winemaker who arrived decades ago and, for reasons that become obvious fast, never left.
Along the way, Château Mukhrani, Villa Mosavali, Iago’s Wine, Solomnishvili Winery, Vazisubani Estate, Teliani Valley, Mukado Wines, Gilauri Wines, and Prince Alexander Tsinandali opened their doors — and more than a few set the supra. That’s Georgia’s legendary feast table: wine, food, and an escalating succession of toasts that have a way of making even the most disciplined camera crew quietly put the gear down and stay awhile.
Wines were poured, names were attempted, mangled, and attempted again — Georgians, it turns out, take a specific and entirely unsubtle pleasure in watching visitors wrestle with Rkatsiteli, Khikhvi, Mtsvane, and a dozen others that didn’t get any easier with the second glass. Then there were the qvevri — Georgia’s traditional clay vessels, buried to the neck in the cellar floor. At one point, a crew member climbed down into an empty one and called up into the dark just to hear what came back. The echo was real — and somewhere in that moment, inside a vessel that carries eight thousand years of memory, the film found its title. Some countries give you a story. Georgia gives you the one you didn’t know you needed.
Get the Wine Ready
Echoes of Wine premieres on SOMM TV on July 1st — and if you want to watch it the right way, now is the time to track down a bottle of Georgian wine and have it waiting.
Look for a Saperavi if you want something dark and serious, with the kind of depth that makes sense once you’ve seen where it comes from. Or find a Kisi — a grape whose name sounds, to English ears, almost exactly like a request for something more intimate, and pours like it’s happy to oblige.
The film is coming. The wine is out there. The only question is whether your glass will be ready.
ECHOS OF WINE premieres world wide on Sommtv.com on July 1st, 2026
