Georgia

What is documented

Official rules for Georgian sparkling wine, such as minimum pressure or time on the lees, were not found in the sources checked. Production statistics for sparkling wine were not found either. This page therefore covers one house whose facts come from its own site, and says so where the information is the producer's.

Notable houses

Bagrationi (Багратиони) was founded in 1937 as the Tbilisi Champagne Factory and was reorganised as a joint-stock company after the dissolution of the USSR.¹

According to the house:

• it owns about 150 ha of vineyards in Kartli, Kakheti and Imereti;¹
• it names the Georgian varieties Chinuri, Mtsvane, Tsitska, Rkatsiteli and Tavkveri among its grapes;¹
• its Finest line is made by second fermentation in the bottle, that is, by the traditional method.¹

The "1882" in the name

The brand name carries the year 1882. The producer's own site does not present it as the company's founding date; the documented founding year is 1937.¹

Tradition: the year 1882 is part of the brand. What is documented is the founding of the Tbilisi Champagne Factory in 1937.

Reading further

For how bottle fermentation works, see prise de mousse and riddling. Nearby on this site: Russia.

A note on the word "champagne"

The factory's 1937 name used the word "champagne" for a Georgian product. In today's Russian law, by comparison, the term "российское шампанское" is reserved for bottle-fermented sparkling wine made in Russia from Russian-grown grapes.^1,2 The French appellation is described on the Champagne page.