From a Soviet-era company to a family business.

Tbilvino is a Georgian wine company headquartered in Tbilisi. A project summary published by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank Group’s private-sector arm, in August 2011 described it as established in 1962 and as one of Georgia’s largest wine producers and exporters. In 1962 Georgia was a republic of the Soviet Union, so the company’s early decades belong to the Soviet wine industry; the company now marks its history from that year, and its website speaks of the firm “marking its 60th year.”

The present company is a family business. The travel and wine site Wine Travel Awards says that in the late 1990s the brothers Zurab and George (Giorgi) Margvelashvili began to lead the company, and the company’s own site introduces the two as its founders. The IFC’s 2011 summary named both brothers as the project sponsors and said that the sponsors own 100% of the company. An archived “Our Company” page from Tbilvino’s earlier website described the division of labour: Zurab as the winemaker, a graduate of Georgia’s agrarian university who had studied at the Wente vineyards in California, and Giorgi as an economist trained at the Maastricht School of Management.

The same archived pages named an Australian chief winemaker, Jeff Aston, who the company said had made Tbilvino’s wines since 2005 after working at Clonakilla in Australia. Wine Travel Awards says the renovation of Tbilvino’s Tbilisi winery was completed in 2008.

Two wineries, Kakheti grapes and the clay qvevri.

Tbilvino’s wine is made in Georgia, at two wineries. Harpers Wine & Spirit said in a promotional feature in August 2024 that the company has one winery in Tbilisi and one in Kvareli, in Kakheti in the north-east of the country. The Kvareli site grew out of the 2011 IFC loan: the IFC’s project summary said the money would pay for primary facilities for grape collecting and crushing in the Kvareli area, about 150 kilometres east of Tbilisi and close to the farmers who supplied the company, and the IFC recorded the investment as made in January 2012. At the time, the summary said, Tbilvino focused solely on wine and bought grapes from more than 300 farmers in the Kakheti region.

The company then moved into growing its own grapes. Wine Travel Awards says the owners bought vineyards in 2014 to create a closed production cycle and that Tbilvino now has 355 hectares of its own vineyards. Harpers placed the vineyards in the Kakheti subregions of Mukuzani, Tsinandali and Kindzmarauli, about 400 metres above sea level. The grapes are Georgian varieties: Saperavi for the reds, and Rkatsiteli, Mtsvane, Kisi and Khikhvi among the whites.

The most distinctive method is the oldest. Harpers described Tbilvino as combining modern production with the qvevri method, in which juice ferments with its skins in clay vessels buried in the ground, and Wine Travel Awards says the company keeps a qvevri cellar, or marani, at Kvareli, while the Tbilisi winery ages its Special Reserve wines in French oak. Tbilvino’s own news pages, archived in 2017, reported that its Qvevris white dry wine had been taken on by the British retailer Marks & Spencer at the start of 2013, and Harpers called Tbilvino the most exported Georgian brand to the United Kingdom in 2024. The company also lists brandy and chacha alongside its wines.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are Armenian brandy houses and Georgian, Lebanese and Israeli wineries: Ararat, Noy, Tbilvino, Teliani Valley, Château Musar, Ixsir and Golan Heights Winery. Brandy and wine brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a restaurant list.

A brandy or wine brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its brandy or wine is actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its brandy or wine is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A house of several labels.

Tbilvino has long sold its wine under more than one name. An archived page from the company’s website, captured in 2016, listed several trade marks. Tbilvino itself covered table, varietal and appellation wines; Georgian Valleys, launched in 2004, was described as fresher and more up to date in style for international markets; Iveriuli was created to widen the range; and Special Reserve marked barrel-aged premium wines, each bottle numbered. A fifth mark, Adati, a word the company translated as “traditions,” used real photographs of noble Georgians of the 19th century set into the form of postage stamps on the label. The company’s news pages also recorded that the Polish discount chain Biedronka began selling an Alazani Valley red under another Tbilvino mark, Didebuli, in December 2014.

The newest range is tied to the company’s anniversary. Harpers reported in August 2024 that a premium range had been launched for it, eight wines including a qvevri Kisi, an Aleksandrouli and a single-vineyard Saperavi, and the current website presents a collection called Rarity Wines under the line “Less is More.”

The name needs a little care online. The company’s current site is tbilvino.ge; its older address was tbilvino.com.ge, while tbilvino.com is a parked domain unconnected to the winery.

For a design guide, Tbilvino shows how one Georgian company can carry a Soviet-era founding date, a family owner and a clay-vessel tradition across a whole family of labels, from photographic heritage marks to numbered reserves. Compare Teliani Valley, the Kakheti winery founded in 1997, and Borjomi, the Georgian mineral water. For this guide we use Saperavi red, qvevri clay and parchment with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Tbilvino’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.