Corus Imports Offers a Large Selection of Wines for the Upcoming Holidays

From Thanksgiving through New Year's, the wines you pour change three or four times over. Here's how to think about the season — and where Georgian wine fits into each part of it.

The holiday stretch gets talked about as a single event, but anyone who hosts knows it isn't one. A Thanksgiving table, a cookie exchange, a formal Christmas dinner, a New Year's toast, and a bottle handed to a host on the way in the door are five different problems with five different answers. At Corus Imports, we spend the fall making sure our portfolio covers all of them — and Georgian wine turns out to be unusually well suited to a season built around long meals, large groups, and people who don't all drink the same thing.

The Season Is Really Several Different Occasions

The mistake most people make is buying for the season instead of buying for the occasion. Six bottles of one crowd-pleasing red gets you through exactly one dinner and leaves you improvising for everything else.

A better approach is to think in categories: something with structure and acidity for the big meals, something bright and low-commitment for parties where people are standing up, something sparkling for the toast, and one or two bottles set aside purely as gifts. Georgian wine has a credible answer in every one of those categories, which is part of why our portfolio tends to get built out in the fall rather than in any single style.

For the Long Meals: Structure, Acidity, Restraint

Holiday dinners are rich, salty, and complicated — roasts, gravies, root vegetables, sweet glazes, and half a dozen herbs competing in the same bite. Wines that lean on oak and alcohol flatten all of that. Wines with acidity and grip work with it.

This is where qvevri-fermented amber wines earn their place. Made from white grapes fermented on their skins in buried clay vessels, they have the aromatics of a white and the tannic structure of a red, plus a savory, dried-fruit character that stands up to a heavy plate without overwhelming it. Rkatsiteli is the anchor; skin-contact wines from Kisi, Khikhvi, and Mtsvane bring more floral and stone-fruit range. On the red side, Saperavi delivers real depth and dark fruit while keeping the fresh acidity that keeps a long meal moving.

For Parties: Bottles That Work Standing Up

Wines for a party are judged differently than wines for a table. They need to be immediately likable, easy to drink without food, and forgiving of a glass that's been sitting out for twenty minutes.

Georgian whites do this well. Tsolikouri, Tsitska, and Chinuri produce clean, mineral-driven wines with the kind of brightness that holds up in a warm room, and Chinuri in particular is prized for that minerality in both still and sparkling form. For reds, lighter varieties like Tavkveri pour easily for guests who want red wine without tannin. And Georgian semi-sweet reds — Kindzmarauli and Khvanchkara among them — are consistently the bottles that win over people who say they don't like wine.

For the Toast: Sparkling With a Story

Sparkling wine is the one holiday purchase people make almost entirely on habit, which makes it the easiest place to bring something unexpected. Georgian traditional-method sparkling wines, often built on Chinuri or Mtsvane, tend toward crisp citrus and stone fruit with a fine, persistent bead — familiar enough in shape to satisfy anyone expecting Champagne, different enough in character to become the thing people ask about.

👉 Corus Imports Tip: Buy your holiday sparkling in early December, not on December 30th. Supply tightens sharply in the last two weeks of the year, and the interesting bottles are the first to go — particularly in smaller-production categories where there was never much inventory to begin with.

For Gifting: The Bottle Nobody Already Owns

The hardest gift to give a wine drinker is wine, because anyone serious already has a cellar full of the obvious things. A Georgian bottle solves that. Even someone who's spent thirty years with Burgundy and Barolo is unlikely to have opened an amber wine from Kakheti or a Saperavi from a small family producer.

It also gives the gift something to say. Georgia has more than 8,000 years of continuous winemaking history and over 500 indigenous grape varieties, and a bottle that carries that context lands differently than one more well-reviewed Cabernet. For gifting, we'd point toward the rarer end of the portfolio — the varieties that a generation ago rarely left their home villages.

For Retailers and Restaurants: Plan the Season Now

If you're building a holiday list rather than a holiday dinner, the calculus is different. The wines that sell hardest in December are the ones a staff member can describe in one sentence, and Georgian wine gives you plenty of those — the oldest winemaking tradition in the world, clay-vessel fermentation, a grape that's red all the way through.

Stock across styles rather than depth in one, and give your team a reason to recommend each bottle. Discovery sells well in December, when people are buying for others and looking for something with a story attached.

Explore the Portfolio

Our selection heading into this holiday season is the broadest we've offered — amber and white wines, dry and semi-sweet reds, sparkling, and a growing number of rare indigenous varieties from producers across Kakheti, Kartli, Imereti, and Samegrelo.

Browse the full range to put your holiday lineup together, or get in touch and we'll help you build a list for your table, your shop, or your program.