Ojaleshi

Tasting note

A naturally semi-sweet red, our first year with this variety. Dark ruby, velvety, with black cherry, forest berry, violet, and a whisper of black pepper on the finish. Fermentation in qvevri is arrested naturally when the cellar cools to twelve degrees, leaving the wine the residual sugar it was born with, not sugar added. Softly sweet, not syrupy. No chemical additives.

Origin

Ojaleshi means grows on trees in Megrelian, the language of Samegrelo in western Georgia. Historically the vine was not trellised but climbed into alder and persimmon in village gardens. The variety's ancestral home is Salkhino, the 19th-century estate of Prince Davit Dadiani, expanded by his son-in-law Prince Achille Murat, grandson of Napoleon's marshal. At the 1912 Paris Agricultural Exhibition, a Salkhino Ojaleshi won the gold medal. In 2025 we planted and vinified our own Ojaleshi for the first time, here in Buknari, on Adjaran ground. A single qvevri. A few hundred bottles. The first bottling in thirty-five years of this cellar to carry the name. A new chapter in a family story that began in 1991.

Food pairing

Roast duck with cherry. Megrelian kupati with tkemali. Aged blue cheese. Dark chocolate. The closing hour of a long table.