Overview

In Folio, large. Pp. [1] f.e., VIII, 440 pp., [1] r.e., 57 color plates

First edition of this monumental color-illustrated ampelography of Georgia, a comprehensive survey of over 520 Georgian grape varieties, and an extraordinary state scientific project devoted to one of the world's oldest and richest traditions of viticulture. Published by the Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR in parallel Georgian and Russian text, the volume set out to document a vine culture whose diversity had accumulated over centuries: more than 520 indigenous cultivars were recorded by the wider project, with fifty-seven of the most economically important selected here for detailed study and illustration. The project had been proposed at the Georgian Agricultural Institute in 1938 but took shape in earnest after 1945, when the country's viticulture was organized for study according to its historical-geographic regions - Kakheti, Kartli, Imereti, Racha-Lechkhumi, Samegrelo, Guria, Adjara, and Abkhazia. Three Georgian scholars divided the principal work. N. N. Ketskhoveli, general editor, wrote on Georgia's natural conditions and the historical geography of its viticulture; M. A. Ramishvili contributed the prospectus for its future development and numerous individual cultivar studies; and D. I. Tabidze, director of the Institute of Viticulture and Winemaking, examined the composition of Georgia's vineyards and supplied a further group of varietal monographs. The great achievement of the book, however, is visual. Artists E. Derevitskaya and E. Pomerantseva, together with two further illustrators identified as Lemkul and Azarov, were brought from Leningrad and Moscow to the Institute of Viticulture and Winemaking at Telavi, where the principal commercial cultivars were painted at natural size. The resulting fifty-seven color plates transform a state agricultural census into something approaching a botanical portrait gallery - and the first illustrated ampelography of the country. Production proved so demanding that, according to the closing note, the volume took more than fifteen years to complete, largely because of difficulties reproducing the illustrations. The colophon records that it finally went to press on 18 November 1960 in an edition of 3,000 copies. The result is much more than a Soviet agricultural handbook: a bilingual documentary census of Georgian vine culture at the point where regional memory, field observation, botanical illustration, and state taxonomy meet, preserving in remarkable color the grape varieties of a viticultural landscape undergoing rapid modernization.

Ref. National Library of Georgia, 1234/4184; National Science Library of Georgia, record 22857.