Georgian wine PDOs

Just a quick post to remind you of my Georgian PDO mini-series, and also help you get a better overview of it – something otherwise hampered by the reverse-chronological order on my home page.

My first post aims to give a quick practical guide to the Georgian PDOs you are most likely to come across in the UK – Tsinandali, Mukuzani, Kindzmarauli and Khvanchkara . Arguably, these are also the most important PDOs in general. In outline at least, this covers pretty much everything that most wine drinkers will need to know about Georgian PDOs, while the other two posts in the series are more hardcore.

After the practical guide, I dive into more detail, listing and summarising all the current PDOs, and giving a bit of background. Here I try to stick to the facts.

Finally, I express opinions about the Georgian PDO system and labelling requirements, and offer a few suggestions for improvement.

How to research PDO and PGI wine regulations

The name of a PDO or IGP on a wine bottle label conveys a lot of information: where the wine comes from, the grape varieties it may contain, the production methods, and permitted yields. These details are often summarised in wine books, and online in various places, but if you want information that is guaranteed to be accurate, complete and up-to-date, you really need to go the original specification documents.

cahier-des-chargesHere I tell you how to find and read these document for the two biggest wine-producing countries: France and Italy. The methods of finding them, particularly in the case of France, are not at all straightforward – I discovered them by asking on online wine forums, and by poking around on the official websites.

At the EU level

You can find all the PDO and PGI names by using this eAmbrosia form. It requires little explanation, but I would like to draw you attention to one detail that could be extremely useful in the future, and eventually render the rest of this blog post obsolete. If you perform a search, and then click on any PDF icon in the “Action” column, you open a short document. At the bottom of this, there is a field “Reference to the single document”, which in all the examples I have checked contains “Not yet available”. It seems that this will eventually link to a document that describes the PDO of PGI. What a wonderfully simple idea, if and when it ever gets implemented. (Update 10/05/21: I now notice that the short document referred to above sometimes links to a few documents relevant to that particular PDO, including an EU Official Journal article that is translated into several European languages, including English, which is very useful.)

French AOC specifications

The simplest way I have found is to start here, where you then enter the PDO or AOC name of interest in the “Nom du produit” field. I have found the system to be tolerant of missing hyphens and accents, but otherwise you must get the spelling correct, so use the EU system first if you need to check on the spelling. Then click “Lancer la recherche”. If you get far too many hits, you might want to repeat the search with more restrictive criteria. You could, for example, limit the search to wines by selecting “Vins” in the “Types / Catégories” field. When you have found the wine you want in the search results, click on its “Fiche détaillée” link. On the page that opens, click on “Cahier des charges” and then “accéder au cahier des charges”. You then get a list of documents, and the one you want is the one with “cahier des charges” in the title. That contains all the information you need about regulations for the AOC. But what a palaver! What we really need is a big link reading: “Just give me the sodding cahier des charges, and give it to me now”.

The Italian system

In comparison, the Italian system is a model of clarity and simplicity. Firstly, go to this page, and scroll down to the lists of zip files. You need one of the zip files listed under “Disciplinari di produzione vini” or “Documenti unici riepilogativi disciplinari (fascicoli tecnici)”, for DOCG, DOC or IGT. Each zip files contains a number of specification files grouped together by the initial letter of the name you are looking for. It’s difficult to describe,  but when you see the lists you will soon get the hang of it. As far as I can make out, the two types of files – “disciplinari” and “documenti unici” – contain essentially the same information, but laid out in a different way. You will notice that the “documenti unici” have the reference numbers you find when performing searches using the EU E-Bacchus system, so my guess is that these documents were designed by the Italians to be linked to in the “reference to the single document” field I mentioned above. Sadly though, the E-Bacchus guys have not yet got round to putting the links into their search results.

But I cannot read French and Italian

As you might expect, the specification documents I told you how to find are in French and Italian. If you have even the merest smattering of those languages it is not too difficult to spot things like grape varieties, but if you need more help there are online translation services for PDF documents. I found that Google Translate does a decent job. If you downloaded the specification PDF you need translating, which is probably the easiest way to proceed, you should click on “translate a document” and upload your PDF to Google Translate. You can then save the translation if you wish.

Doubtless these methods will at some point be broken by changes to the official websites, but there is at least hope that future changes might make access simpler.