A winery built in 1997 with borrowed equipment.

Teliani Valley is a Georgian winery based in Telavi, the main town of the Kakheti wine region in the east of the country. The company says it was founded in 1997 by two young winemakers who built it from scratch for “the liberty to make the wine they wanted.” The trade site The Buyer reported in April 2024 that the founders started out with equipment borrowed from the old state-run winery. The US retailer Georgian Wine House says the company was established on the site of a 19th-century winery in the village of Teliani, which gives the brand its name, and that its first vintage was released in 2000.

Within a decade the company had outside shareholders. The Georgian business paper The Financial reported in October 2009 that two of its shareholders, Archil Gegenava and Giorgi Zhordania, had sold their combined stake of about 25.1% to Nikora, a Georgian food processor and retailer. The paper quoted Eli Enoch, a member of the winery’s supervisory board, as welcoming Nikora and as describing Gegenava as instrumental in establishing Teliani Valley in its present form. The same report said Gegenava had stepped down from the board after his election to the Georgian Parliament in May 2008 and had no active management role afterwards. It also reported that Teliani Valley had bought a 19.96% stake in the neighbouring producer Telavi Wine Cellar in July 2008.

A notice published by the Georgian Stock Exchange in May 2018 recorded Georgian Capital JSC as the holder of 47.97% of Teliani Valley JSC, and said that on 4 May 2018 it had merged with its parent, Georgian Capital Group JSC. In a stock-market announcement of March 2019, the investment company Georgia Capital described Teliani as “a leading wine and beer producer in Georgia.”

Own vineyards, Telavi cellars and the qvevri.

The wine is made in Georgia. The company says its cellar is in Telavi and that it owns 700 hectares of vineyards, growing 25 grape varieties in four of Georgia’s winemaking regions, with Kakheti at its centre. It says that since 1997 it has made wine both by classic methods and in the qvevri, the clay vessel buried in the ground in which Georgian wine is traditionally fermented and aged, and that its range runs to red, white and amber wines, the last being white grapes fermented on their skins.

Several of the ranges carry the founding year or the region in their names. The Buyer named a special series called Winery 97, a Glekhuri Qvevri line, a range called “Wine People” and Kakhuri No. 8. Rare grapes are part of the story too: English Wikipedia’s article on the red variety Usakhelouri says only around a thousand bottles of it are produced in the country, mainly by Teliani Valley, and its article on chacha, the Georgian grape-pomace spirit, lists Teliani Valley among the better-known producers.

The winery has turned increasingly to Western markets. The Buyer reported that the company named the United Kingdom a key strategic market in 2019, before it had an importer there, that its British importer is Boutinot, whose staff had trained with Teliani and visited Georgia in 2024, and that its main markets include the United States, Canada, Germany and Japan. The same report said a representative office, Teliani Europe GmbH, had operated in Berlin since 2021, and quoted Salome Mosidze, the company’s head of marketing. Georgian Wine House says Teliani Valley has been on the American market longer than any other Georgian company, and puts its output at more than two million bottles a year.

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 winery, a stock-exchange company and a name to check.

Teliani Valley is a joint-stock company, and its documented ownership has changed more than once. The record runs from a supervisory board with outside investors in the late 2000s, through Nikora’s purchase in 2009, to the 47.97% stake held within the Georgia Capital group. The company’s own pages name it simply as Teliani Valley, JSC, and present the winery rather than its shareholders: the founding year of 1997, the Telavi cellar, the vineyards and the qvevri.

The name also has a namesake to keep apart. Teliani Valley Polska S.A. is a separately listed Polish company, whose shareholder notices appear in the Polish financial press, such as Parkiet in 2020; it should not be confused with the Georgian winery’s own filings on the Georgian Stock Exchange. The winery’s site is telianivalley.com.

For a design guide, Teliani Valley shows how a young company can borrow the authority of an old place, setting a 1997 founding date beside a 19th-century cellar site, a buried clay vessel and the name of a Kakheti village. Compare Tbilvino, the Tbilisi winery established in 1962, and Natakhtari, the Georgian village brewery. For this guide we use valley plum, amber wine and vine green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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