Temuri Ugulava died in the early hours of June 22 while undergoing treatment for lung cancer. He was 56.
I feel honored to have known him, to have written about him, to have seen and experienced his vision, especially in Udabno, what appears to be the largest regenerative farm on that side of the world. His dedication was mad genius and utterly sincere.
Having come of age during the difficult years of Soviet collapse and its aftermath, he went on to become one of the people who helped reshape modern Georgia. He did so with generosity, enthusiasm, and an abiding love for his country. He was an extremely lovable man whose impact reached far beyond wine.
He was deeply loved, and he made an enduring difference in the country he cared for so passionately.
I wrote the below story last year for Air Mail. It covered the way he came to natural wine and saw it as a change delivery system for Georgia.
My heart goes out to his children, his wife Nato, who was such a good sport about this particular article.
Under the Georgian Sun
Stamba Hotel, in Tbilisi, has made a business out of being a hive for hip locals and serving the best natural wines Georgia has to offer
Opened in 2018, Stamba Hotel didn’t take long to achieve icon status in Tbilisi, Georgia. Extracted from the ribs of a 1960s modernist printing house and office, the hotel knits together Soviet industrial and Russian Revival architecture with hints of Frank Lloyd Wright and a Wes Anderson attitude.
But while many luxury hotels try to keep the locals out, Stamba, owned by the Georgian hotel chain Adjara Group, has made a business out of drawing them to the hotel’s co–working space D-Block, to take selfies with resident lobby dog Kimchee or to grab a bottle of wine and drink it in the jasmine-twined courtyard.
Along with well-known actors and musicians such as John Malkovich and Patti Smith, Adjara owner Temur Ugulava himself can be spotted on the floor in a T-shirt, with a tangle of keys and a couple of tools spilling from his pocket just in case something needs fixing. (Yet, the 57-year-old cleans up well, and the affectionate joke is that everyone wants to be his next ex.)
His latest love isn’t a woman, though. It is something ingrained in the cultural fabric of Georgia: wine. Specifically, natural wine—organic with nothing added or taken away.
Ugulava had been a mezcal drinker who grudgingly made room for Bordeaux and Puligny-Montrachet. But as he watched his country’s 8,000-year-old wine-making tradition come back to life, he felt the urge to learn more. The American expat wine-maker John Wurdeman, of Pheasant’s Tears in Sighnaghi, Georgia, advised him to visit Copenhagen, with its deep larder of older Georgian vintages. There, Ugulava would experience what a city on fire for natural wine looked like. With Wurdeman guiding, Ugulava drank and ate his way from high-end Noma to low-key Propaganda. “I found emotion in a drink that previously bored me,” Ugulava said.
It was at the Copenhagen wine importer Rosforth & Rosforth’s somewhat disorganized office and shop, Under the Bridge, that Ugulava found his inspiration. “I loved the chaos, the boxes, the unpretentious shelving, where customers grabbed bottles and drank them by the canal.”
Within a month, he had moved the former wine director of Noma, Mads Kleppe, to Tbilisi to oversee the new wine program, and soon after he converted his properties—the Rooms hotel chain, Stamba, and his various clubs—to all natural wine, all the time.
In a light-filled room with stadium seating hugging Stamba’s interior courtyard, he replicated Copenhagen’s controlled chaos with Warehouse. This wine bar and shop has morphed into a powerful magnet for the hotel, stocking the best of both Georgian and European natural wine, doing numbers any venue would envy and at prices any consumer would queue up for. The only question is, natural wine being a limited commodity: Can the hotel keep up with the demand?
This spring, the staff was busily restocking shelves with bottles, recouping from a pop-up event with Barcelona’s Bar Brutal. Over the weekend, the bar and the garden were packed to almost illegal capacity and sold an astounding 1,500 bottles. Those revelers were Ugulava’s dream: hotel guests mixing with a whole lot of locals and connecting over his country’s most beloved export—wine.
Alice Feiring is the author of To Fall in Love, Drink This, Natural Wine for the People, and other books. Her Substack is the Feiring Line
Photos: Eric Martin/Figarophoto/Redux (lobby bar); Fabian Weiss/laif/Redux (industrial columns, Café Stamba); Courtesy of Stamba Hotel (all others)
This is so beautiful. May his memory be a blessing.