Iago’s Chinuri Named “The Apogee” in Top Hipster Wines List

TBILISI – Iago Bitarishvili’s Chinuri has been called “the apogee of the hipster wine drinking experience in the Top 10 Hipster Wines at the Ritz, article by the Drinks Business publication.

The iconic London Ritz Hotel has recently updated its Le Livre de Vin, or wine list, which for the first time includes a Georgian Orange Wine, the 2013 Iago Bitarishvili Chardakhi Chinuri.

“An extended skin contact wine made according to an unbroken 8,000-year-old winemaking tradition in the very cradle of wine, Georgia. Cloudy, bizarre-smelling (by conventional standards) and unlike anything The Ritz wine list has ever seen before,” reads the article, by Darren Smith.

In his half-serious article, the author tries to define ‘hipster’, “it having something to do with a certain homogeneity of appearance, habit and opinion rendered ironic by their conscious striving to express their individuality. Hipster wines are a similarly loose concept. Some are hipster, according to the impenetrable logic of ‘cool’, just because they are.”

Iago's Chinuri was recently placed by American Vogue magazine at the top of Vogue's list of orange wines.

Iago’s is a boutique winery founded in 2003 by Iago Bitarishvili. They organically farm two hectares of vines which yield only around 2500 bottles per year. All the wine is fermented and aged in kvevri (a traditional Georgian earthenware vat for wine) using Chinuri, a grape variety indigenous to the Kartli region in central Georgia.

By Ana Akhalaia