How an anthropologist’s audio essay captures what words can’t – the hum of a culture finding its audience

There is a sound Georgian wine makes that you cannot quite name. It is not the pop of a cork or the glug of a pour. It is the low, ambient hum of a supra table filling with bottles, and  the clinking, the laughter, the toasts stacking on top of each other like sediment. It is the noise of eight thousand years of winemaking culture pressing against the walls of a wine bar in Brooklyn or a bottle shop in Copenhagen, trying to be heard.

Rikki Brown heard it. A PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, Brown spent three years doing fieldwork across Georgia’s winemaking regions, from Tbilisi to Kakheti to Imereti. Her research examines how technology, sociality, and politics collide in the Georgian wine economy; how a bottle of Saperavi or Rkatsiteli is never just wine, but a vessel for identity, heritage, and the long aftershock of empire (Brown 2022). In May 2025, she published “Buzzy Bottles: Sound and Sociality in Georgian Wine” in Anthropology News, part of the journal’s Signal/Noise issue. 

“For the Republic of Georgia, wine bottles up layers of identity and filters out oppressive, imperial histories of invasion, war, and occupation.”

That line, from Brown’s earlier work in the TSU-TI International Scientific Journal (Brown 2022), gets at the core of what makes Georgian wine’s arrival in the West so loaded. These are not new wines discovering an audience. They are ancient wines — fermented in qvevri buried in the earth, made from grapes most Western sommeliers couldn’t pronounce a decade ago — arriving with eight millennia of cultural baggage and a very recent post-Soviet urgency to be seen on their own terms.

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What Brown’s audio essay captures so well is the sensory texture that gets lost in translation. The supra (the Georgian feast) is not a dinner. It is a choreographed social performance governed by a tamada (toastmaster), where wine flows in a specific order, at a specific pace, with specific words. When Brown records the sound of bottles being opened at a supra, she is not just documenting noise. She is documenting the acoustic architecture of a culture that has used wine as its primary social technology for longer than most nations have existed.

The Western wine world has historically struggled to receive this on its own terms. Georgian wine enters a market that has already decided what it should be: amber, skin-contact, “natural.” The amber ceiling and this assumption that Georgian wine means qvevri-fermented white wine and nothing else, flattens an entire country’s output into a single aesthetic category. Brown’s work reminds us that Georgia’s wine economy encompasses industrial-scale producers in Kakheti, garage winemakers in Tbilisi, family cellars in Imereti, and everything in between. The sound of that diversity is louder than any single trend.

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The buzz, though, is real. Georgian wine exports topped 107 million bottles to 64 countries in 2024 (Wine Enthusiast 2025). Natural wine bars from New York to Tokyo feature qvevri-fermented whites alongside the classical Saperavis that have been Georgia’s red wine backbone for centuries. Importers like Saperavi Brothers are building distribution networks state by state, connecting producers like Chelti Winery and Chubini with American retailers who understand that Georgian wine is not a fad, but an introduction.

Brown’s essay arrives at a moment when that introduction is well underway but far from finished. That is the buzz that matters.

References & Acknowledgments

Brown, Rikki. 2022. “Autonomous Political Economies: Winemakers, National Heritage, and the Ethnographic Mapping of Geopolitics in the Republic of Georgia.” TSU-TI International Scientific Journal of Humanities, Vol. 1. Tbilisi State University. https://tsuti.tsu.ge/index.php/journal/article/view/5

Brown, Rikki. 2025. “Buzzy Bottles: Sound and Sociality in Georgian Wine.” Anthropology News, May 27, 2025. Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (SAFN). https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/buzzy-bottles-sound-and-sociality-in-georgian-wine/

Brown, Rikki. 2025. “Georgian Wine: Taste, Politics, and Place.” Lecture, SRAS. YouTube. Photographs by Rowan Twine.

Wine Enthusiast. 2025. “Georgia’s Ancient Wine Culture has Lasting Relevance.” wineenthusiast.com.

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