The name comes from an old Georgian saying: only wine good enough to bring a pheasant to tears of joy is truly worth drinking. Pheasant's Tears took it as a standard to live up to.
Backstory
The winery was founded in 2007 by John Wurdeman, an American painter and musician, and Gela Patalishvili, whose family had made wine for eight generations. Wurdeman first heard Georgian folk music at 15, studied art in Moscow, and bought a home in the medieval hilltop town of Sighnaghi in 1996. The partnership grew into one of the leading names of Georgia's natural wine revival and helped carry qvevri winemaking to a global audience.
The Region
Kakheti, in eastern Georgia, is the country's main wine region and the heart of a tradition reaching back roughly 8,000 years, often cited as the cradle of winemaking. The estate is centered on the village of Tibaani, near the medieval hill town of Sighnaghi, in a near-semi-desert climate that is hot and dry by day and cool and windy at night, conditions that suit ripe but balanced fruit.
Vineyards & Farming
Pheasant's Tears farms organically across about 17 hectares in eastern Kakheti, beginning with a 12-hectare plot at Tibaani that includes 4 hectares of roughly 25-year-old Saperavi on sandstone and quartz soils. The estate has made it a mission to track down and revive near-extinct indigenous varieties. Georgia is home to more than 500 native grapes, and the winery has worked with well over 100 of them, with more still under study.
Winemaking
The wines are made in the traditional Georgian way, fermented and aged in qvevri, the large clay vessels buried underground. The whites macerate on their skins to give the amber, or orange, style for which the region is famous. For the Saperavi, half the grapes are destemmed into qvevri and half go in whole-bunch and are pressed after ten days, a semi-carbonic touch. Production runs with no fining, no filtration, and little to no added sulfur.
The Wines
The range showcases Georgia's native grapes: the white and amber Rkatsiteli, Kisi, Khikhvi, Mtsvane, and Tsitska, and the deep red Saperavi. Each is a window into a grape and a method that nearly vanished under Soviet industrialization.
