Pheasant's Tears Kisi 2024

Profile & Story

Pheasant's Tears was founded in Sighnaghi, in Kakheti, by Gela Patalishvili, an eighth-generation Georgian winemaker, and John Wurdeman, an American painter who settled in Georgia in 1998. The house works only in qvevri - beeswax-lined clay amphorae buried in the ground - fermenting with native yeasts and without modern correction. The Kisi is made by whole-bunch maceration: skins and stems alike are gently crushed into the qvevri and left on the skins for six months, then racked into a fresh qvevri and aged there for a further year before bottling. This is what Georgians call amber wine, and what the rest of the world has learned to call orange wine. Kisi is both a tannic and a strongly aromatic Kakhetian variety.