New Projects by Nika Vacheishvili’s Atenuri Marani

"Nika Vacheishvili’s Atenuri Marani” has been working on several projects, including on the expansion of cheese and honey production.

The company also plans to start production of dried fruits and implement an educational project. Nika Vacheishvili, the former head of the National Culture Heritage Protection Agency and currently, the founder of Atenuri Marani, has talked about the ongoing and coming projects for the Business Partner TV program.

Nika Vacheishvili arranged a wine cellar in Ateni in 2013. In 2016, he also built a 6-room guesthouse that was expanded in several years and now it has become a 19-suite hotel. He has arranged new vineyards of Chinebuli, Goruli Mtsvane, and Tavkveri grapes on 3.5 hectares. He uses traditional winemaking methods. Only a small part of wines is sold at natural wines stores in Tbilisi. The greater part is sold locally. “Our philosophy is to popularize Ateni so as foreign and domestic tourists visit our place and see the production process, not to send our honey and wines to other places”, Nika Vacheishvii noted. Our company also produces goat and cattle cheese. We launched dairy product production in small volumes in 2019 (50 kilograms a month), but we plan to expand the scales, Vacheishvili pointed out. ‘We have an experimental phase because our complex still requires various equipment and support. We produce 4-5 cheese varieties by various technologies, including spread cheese, melted cheese, cheese aged in wine, and honey.

We plan to attract EUR 10,000 to expand our cheese production”, Nika Vacheishvili noted. We buy required raw materials from local farmers, while goat milk is produced at our own farm, Vacheishvili said.

‘We have arranged a small group of friends of Ateni Marani and we plan to produce dried fruit, stewed fruits, marmalades, tinned honey under the aegis of this group and sell products in the distribution network, in small volumes, but with high quality. We have no ambition to enter big markets because we produce only exclusive tastes”, Nika Vacheishvili said. We also plan to arrange exhibition space and to produce clay soaps, he added. “All these directions are to combine historical traditions with future concepts. I have no distinct and specific interest in dried fruit or cheese or wine. We want to restore tradition, the economy of tomorrow, and the Georgia of tomorrow. This process is interconnected with education. We plan to arrange a summer school. We launched this project in the test regime 2-3 years ago, but we plan to expand the scales. The school teaches old agrarian culture and winemaking history. This will be a multidiscipline platform starting from viticulture ending with restoration of castles and old road”, Nika Vacheishvili said.