Eastbound Advisory · 5 min read

Written by Nick Russell

The natural wine import market in the United States has a problem that most people in the industry will not say out loud: the original discovery regions are getting crowded.

Beaujolais. The Jura. Friuli. Burgundy producers working without sulfites. Skin-contact whites from Slovenia. These are no longer discoveries — they are established categories with established pricing and established competition. The importers who built their reputations on these regions are now looking for what comes next.

What importers are actually saying

Talk to natural wine importers — the serious ones with strong restaurant accounts in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland — and you hear the same thing: we are looking for regions with genuine heritage, low production volumes, and stories our accounts have not heard yet.

Georgia checks every box. 8,000 years of unbroken winemaking tradition. UNESCO-protected techniques. 525+ indigenous grape varieties that no American wine drinker has heard of. Natural production methods that predate the natural wine movement by several millennia. A wine culture so embedded in Georgian identity that families have been doing this the same way for generations — not because it is trendy, but because it is who they are.

The timing is now

Georgian wine exports to the US grew at 15.5% annually from 2021 to 2024. The Tbilisi episode of Somebody Feed Phil became the highest-rated episode in the show's history on IMDb. Wine directors at serious restaurants are beginning to ask questions. The category is in the exact right moment — early enough that first-movers establish the reference points, late enough that the infrastructure exists to make it happen.

The importers who position in Georgian wine now will own the category in five years. That window is open. It will not stay open.