Iberieli Saperavi Kakheti 2022

This Iberieli Saperavi 2022 just won a TexSomm Gold award — crowned blind by our nation’s best and brightest sommeliers at this esteemed annual conference. The wine is fresh yet dark, brooding but also vivacious, like wild peak-summer bramble berries mashed over bell peppers and crushed granite… and it’s “natural”: farmed organically, hand-harvested and manually de-stemmed, native yeast fermented on a smaller proportion of skins and aged in qvevri for 11 months, no fining, no filtering, a skosh of sulfur at bottling and that’s it.  The result is an all-around snappier style of Saperavi that still shows the grape’s classic black fruit and earthy depth but does so with a little more lift, levity and liveliness.  Pair with roast duck and game, smoky eggplant, sage-scented brothy beans, cumin meatballs, football games and full moons rising.