These delicious wines have travelled so far to be with us and they’re finally here! This is the Definitely Maybe hazy and wildly interesting pet nat bubbles. As always, deals when you bundle. :)

What’s inside:
Ori Marani, ‘Definitely Maybe’, Goruli Mstvane & Chinuri, Lamiskana, GEO We’ve heard people throw around the term “unicorn wine” in reference to a wine that is entirely unique & utterly singular; we tend to reject this line of thinking, since we think every great wine has some special characteristic that belongs entirely to itself and so is worthy of celebration. That being said: Definitely Maybe is definitely (& in this case, definitely NOT maybe) as rare as the rarest gem, as cool & unforeseen as a chill unicorn (or pegasus, which we all know are cooler because they can fly, no offense unicorns) walking down Dundas Street West & into Grape Witches for a caszh glass of wine on our back patio. Hazy and misty in the glass like a foggy seaside morning with an electric palest yellow-green shade in the glass, DM has a lean but creamy texture which, when coupled with its savoury palate, is almost sake-esque. Made from 40% aged non-vintage qvevri reserve wine blended with Goruli Mstvane & carbonically macerated Chinuri from the 2020 vintage, this is the first ever cuvee of Definitely Maybe as well as being a Grapewitches exclusive! Vinified using aspects of the traditional (think: Champagne) as well as ancestral (think: wild pet-nat) method of sparkling wine, DM has a frothy riptide mousse that we would really love to surf on. With its fascinating palate of fresh banana, leafy green, congee, delicate white tea & Bosc pear skin, Definitely Maybe is a blue moon, a serendipitious moment, the first time you ever heard the backwards vocals in Get Your Freak On by Missy Elliott, a truly off-kilter rarity that will blow the mind of that one friend we all have who thinks they’ve tried everything.

I NEED MORE

Bastien and his wife Nino established Ori Marani in 2016, with their first official vintage in 2017. They are located in Igoeti, in the Shida Kartli region of central Georgia – minutes from downtown Tbilisi. We know Bastien from his time as the assistant winemaker at Benjamin Bridge in Nova Scotia and, being from a vinegrowing family in Champagne, it makes perfect sense that he and Nino focus their efforts on a small range of traditional method sparkling wines, in addition to a few still wines in all colours. All their wines are aged first for a period of time in qvevri followed by barrel aging, making this a truly unique kind of hybrid project in the context of a continuous 8000 year-old wine making tradition that has arguably not changed much over the course of that time. Ori Marani, literally meaning “Two Wineries”, is one half of their ultimate dream to have two wineries – the second producing amphora-aged Champagne (!).

Our experience with Georgian wine is often limited to the bold orange wines so historically familiar but, as with most other wine regions in the world, there’s so much more to explore; hundreds of indigeneous grapes that exist nowhere else in the world with hugely diverse approaches to skin contact for whites (there are whole regions with a history of zero skin contact!), and structure in reds. The one consistent factor inherently Georgian is the history of amphora aging. With no estate vineyards yet, Bastien sources his fruit from small grower families practicing organic vineyard management in Shida Kartli, Kakheti and Imereti. Grapes for the sparkling wines come from the cooler regions of Kartli and Imereti, where they can mature slowly on limestone soils, retaining all that freshness. The used barrels come from Champagne Egly-Ouriet and Burgundian Domaine Prieuré Roch, Domaine Hubert Lamy, Domaine de Villaine among others.