2026 · Live
We don't make the wine. We keep it.
ჩვენ ღვინოს არ ვაკეთებთ. ჩვენ მას ვუვლით.
A name the land has carried for 625 years. A cellar the family has kept for 35.
Khimshiashvili Cellar is not a brand built around a founder arc or sommelier notes. It's a family that has kept Qvevri wine for 35 years on ancestral land in Adjara — land that has carried the Khimshiashvili name for 625 years: from Khimshia Abazasdze's defence against Timur's invasion in 1399 through Ottoman rule, Orthodox conversion and the end of the Soviet Union, to the eparchial award of 2016 handed personally by Metropolitan Dimitri (Shiolashvili) to Nugzar Khimshiashvili.
25 Qvevri, 1.5–2.5 m deep, 12–15 °C constant.
The Marani — the cellar — was built in 2017 with 25 clay vessels. Each Qvevri sits buried up to its shoulder in the earth. Stable ground temperature, beeswax seal, 5–6 months of skin contact in the clay form. This is the method UNESCO inscribed on its intangible cultural heritage list in December 2013.
1991
Founded in Buknari · Adjara · Kobuleti district · ~27 m above sea level
1399
Khimshia Abazasdze · documented family lineage against Timur's invasion
850 m
Nigazeuli mountain vineyard · planted 2012 · ancestral Bey land
< 50 ha
Aladasturi worldwide · < 15 commercial producers globally
Extraordinary raw material, no international narrative.
Before this project Khimshiashvili Cellar had no working web
presence. The existing address
khimshiashvili.com
was blocked by an SSL certificate problem. Visitors saw a
browser security warning before they ever saw a page. There
was a Facebook account. There was no Instagram, no YouTube,
no CellarTracker. A Vivino listing was live, but
Wine-Searcher was missing despite documented export activity.
The gap was not primarily technical. It was documentary. The family held extraordinary raw material: a 2017 competition result (81 points for Tsolikouri), a 2016 certificate signed by a metropolitan, an ancestor portrait in Chokha with a silver cartridge belt, drone footage over the Buknari estate, bottle photography for seven wines. None of it had been translated into a coherent international narrative.
The secondary problem was specificity. Much Georgian wine marketing leans on the same generic scaffolding: "ancient tradition", "UNESCO heritage", "family passion". Khimshiashvili's actual differentiators are more specific and more defensible: the Aladasturi grape exists on fewer than 50 hectares worldwide; their Tsolikouri comes from Nigazeuli at 850 m, not from the Buknari coastal vineyard; the Nigazeuli plot is the family's historic Bey stronghold, documented in regional history. None of that was online in English.
12-agent research sprint first.
The project began with a research sprint on 16 April 2026. Twelve agents produced 18 documents on brand, heritage, wine science, legal compliance, SEO, distribution and competitive positioning. The sprint closed knowledge gaps before a single line of code was written. Key findings: Aladasturi as an SEO opportunity (near-zero English content online for an indigenous Georgian variety), the UNESCO Qvevri classification as a legitimate marketing pillar, and the Khimshiashvili dynastic lineage as a verifiable historical claim.
Architecture:
Next.js 16.2.4 with next-intl for 6-language routing
(Georgian as default, locale prefix always present). Hebrew
requires RTL (logical
end-*
properties throughout, never
right-*;
Frank Ruhl Libre and Noto Sans Hebrew). Georgian requires
its own display type: Noto Serif Georgian for Mkhedruli
display, Noto Sans Georgian for body.
Design system "Liquid Terroir":
adapted from SafeRoad VR's Liquid Monolith. Same structural
DNA, fully recoloured for wine. Saperavi garnet
#6B1A2B
primary, Amber Pour
#C4885A
secondary, Warm Linen
#FAF6F0
as surface. Shadows tinted in garnet, never pure black. Two
themes: Liquid Linen (light) and Liquid Cellar
#120A06
(dark). The wine detail pages create a museum effect: light
nav → dark gallery → light footer.
Voice protocol:
the family's own back-label text is the anchor. The phrase
"large lemon-shaped terracotta pot" — their own poetic
description of the Qvevri — is preserved verbatim. Every
wine description ends with the signature ritual: "Made and
bottled in the Khimshiashvili family cellar." Tasting notes
are sourced from the family's own words or marked
[NEEDS VERIFICATION].
Nothing invented.
Embedded assets:
aerial drone video (81 MB, hero background with scroll
parallax and reduced-motion respect), bottle photography
for seven original wines, fortress.jpg, grandfather-bey.jpg
(oil portrait of the ancestor in Chokha with silver
cartridge belt, full-bleed hero on the Story page),
marani.jpg, certificate-of-blessing.jpg (primary source: the
2016 eparchial award, displayed in a
BlessingDocument
lightbox with 6-language translation).
96 static pages. Six languages. Zero warnings.
-
Next.js 16.2.4 (App Router, Turbopack)
96 static pages across 6 languages. localePrefix: "always" with Georgian as default. Static export for Vercel.
-
next-intl 4.9.1
6-language routing with per-language JSON dictionaries. createMiddleware for locale detection.
-
Tailwind CSS 4
No config file. All tokens in globals.css. Liquid Terroir palette with garnet-tinted shadows.
-
Framer Motion 12.38
HeroVideo parallax, reveal with blur, MagneticButton (rewritten as a wine-pulse breath). prefers-reduced-motion respected.
-
Phosphor Icons
Lucide deliberately excluded from the project design system. Phosphor ArrowUpRight on the MagneticButton trailing.
-
next/font/google
GDPR-compliant font loading (no external requests). Marcellus, Cormorant, Plus Jakarta, Inter, Noto Serif/Sans Georgian, Frank Ruhl Libre, Noto Sans Hebrew.
-
Resend
Contact form via Server Action. GDPR-compliant.
-
Vercel
Deployment target. khimshia.com purchased 17/04/2026. SSL automatic.
Six languages, cleanly built.
17 April 2026 (launch sprint): 96 static pages across 6
languages build clean. Zero
MISSING_MESSAGE
warnings in the build log. All 54 wine detail routes
(9 wines × 6 languages) render HTTP 200. Sitemap covers
78+ URLs with hreflang alternates on every one of the 8
inner pages.
What now exists that didn't before: a fully localised,
cross-generational story in six languages — anchored by
primary-source artifacts (the 2016 eparchial certificate,
the family back-label, the ancestor portrait) as
structural spine. Aladasturi — a grape with near-zero
English content online — has its own wine detail page in
six languages, with structured data as
ImageObject
and keyword-optimised copy.
Live: khimshia.com
— domain purchased 17 April 2026. WhatsApp contact
+995 595 086 867
wired live on the Visit and Contact pages.
The most defensible brand claim is often the one the family takes for granted.
Khimshiashvili had been keeping Qvevri on ancestral land for 35 years and producing Aladasturi — one of the rarest commercial varieties on earth — without ever knowing that "fewer than 50 hectares worldwide" is the sentence an importer in London remembers. The research sprint's job was to bring those facts to the surface and put numbers under them. The website's job was to frame them in the family's own register — not in copywriter substitutes.
For antomata: running a 12-agent research sprint before any UI build was a structural choice, not a luxury. Building the evidentiary foundation first — 18 documents, 625 years of lineage verified, tasting notes from the label rather than invented — meant every copy decision in the build sprint had a source to cite. The same holds in the GDPR audit context: classify the zones first (green/grey/red) from evidence, before a single recommendation gets written. The archive is the product; the website is the delivery channel.
„ღვინო, რომელიც მიწიდან მოდის, არავის ეკუთვნის."
"Wine that comes from the earth belongs to no one."
— Manifesto on khimshia.com · the family's opening line