Sipping Your Way Through December—Day 13

Here’s today’s Advent Calendar pick.

2020 Shumi Winery Iberiuli Mukuzani Red

Here’s a wine that passed a real-world ‘test’ with flying colors. My daughter was having some friends over for dinner, and early in the evening, I stopped by and shared this wine with them. The next day, she told me that it was everyone’s favorite wine of the night. I wasn’t surprised, either.

The wine is delicious, and with a 13% ABV, you can sip it all night without getting zonked out. It’s full of dark, ripe fruit, mainly red cherries, which are balanced by notes of dried herbs, tobacco, and hints of delicate violets, iron, and earth. This is Georgian Saperavi at its most refined.

To be clear, this wine is from Georgia, the country, not the state. Saperavi is Georgia’s most important red grape and its most widely planted, much of it in the Kakheti region. The word Saperavi translates to “dye,” a reference to the grape’s inky, deeply pigmented juice. The word "Mukuzani" on the label indicates an area in Kakheti known for producing some of Georgia's finest Saperavi.

Georgian wine tradition is famous for qvevri (pronounced "kvev-ree"), large clay vessels buried underground for fermenting and aging wine. I usually gravitate toward qvevri-made Saperavi for its pure expression of the grape. That said, the Iberiuli Mukuzani is just as enjoyable, even though it is made in a more modern style, with 8 to 10 months of aging in French oak barrels. The wine is elegant and restrained, and its fruit isn’t masked by oak.

If you've been curious about Georgian wine, this is the bottle for you! Find out where to purchase it (for about $22) on wine-searcher.com.