Our story
Why We Built This
Georgia has been making wine for 8,000 years. For most of that time, the people who made it never got to tell their own story.
The Problem We Kept Running Into
Independent Georgian winemakers — the families fermenting Rkatsiteli in century-old qvevri, the small estates experimenting with skin-contact whites in Racha — were sitting on some of the most compelling wines in the world. And almost nobody outside Georgia knew they existed.
Not because the wines weren't good. Because there was no infrastructure connecting them to the importers actively looking for exactly what they make.
Importers were sourcing Georgian wine the hard way: trade shows in Tbilisi, contacts passed along through wine journalists, emails that bounced, PDFs of certificates that arrived weeks late. Producers were waiting — sometimes for years — for a reliable export partner, with no visibility into who was interested or why deals fell through.
The compliance layer made everything worse. Getting certifications, lab analyses, certificates of origin, and state-specific permit documentation into the right hands was a manual process that killed deals before they started.
What We Realized
This wasn't a wine problem. It was a market infrastructure problem.
The wine was extraordinary. Georgia has over 500 indigenous grape varieties — more than any country in Europe — and a winemaking tradition that predates the Roman Empire. Qvevri fermentation, recognized by UNESCO in 2013, produces wines that taste like nothing made anywhere else. The orange wine trend that swept natural wine bars from London to New York? That's a Georgian technique, 8,000 years old.
What was missing was a purpose-built channel between Georgian producers and the international importers who wanted to carry their wines. Something more structured than a trade show floor. Something more efficient than a cold email chain.
What We Built
QvevriConnect is a B2B marketplace designed specifically for the Georgian wine trade. Producers list their wineries, their wines, and their export capacity. Importers browse a curated directory, post sourcing requests, and compare bids side by side.
The Compliance Locker means a producer uploads their certifications once — Georgian Wine Agency credentials, certificates of analysis, organic credentials, export permits — and can share them with any importer in a single click. No more email attachments. No more deals stalled on paperwork.
The RFP engine means importers can describe exactly what they're looking for — grape, style, volume, price, certifications — and receive structured proposals from producers who match. Sample requests, shipment tracking, and tasting outcomes all live in the same place.
Both sides of the market finally have a shared language and a shared workspace.
What We're Trying to Do
Georgian wine deserves to be on more lists, in more glasses, in more markets. The producers making it deserve a direct line to the people who want to carry it.
We built QvevriConnect because we believe the best path to that future is a dedicated, trustworthy platform — one built for the realities of this specific trade, not adapted from a generic marketplace template.
We are a technology platform only. We don't sell wine, hold licenses, or take a cut of deals. We build the infrastructure and get out of the way.