The Caucasus
You are a vineyard newly blossomed.
Young, beautiful, growing in Eden,
You yourself are the sun, shining brilliantly.
—“Thou Art a Vineyard,” Georgian chant, ca. 1100 AD
I stood near the banks of a large river. It tumbled out of the mountains, milky gray with flecks of granite and quartz worn off the snow-covered rock. Clouds and mist obscured the highest peaks. The ochre tower of Alaverdi Monastery stood nearby, surrounded by high stone walls silhouetted against early spring fields. A Game of Thrones episode could be filmed here, with marauding tribes surging across the no-man’s-land. I was in the Republic of Georgia and the Caucasus Mountains, a wild, sometimes violent region home to Anatolian leopards, bears, wolves, lynx, and golden eagles. The Holy Grail of wine grapes that José Vouillamoz hopes to find could be near here, too. The most likely search area for the mother of all modern vines, if you can call it that, stretches from southern Russia down through eastern Turkey, Armenia, and northern Iran—about two hundred miles wide and five hundred miles long on maps. Reading scientific papers about the Caucasus is one thing; seeing them is another. I now understood the real-world challenges scientists are up against in deciphering the wine grape family tree.
The Caucasus Mountains rise to more than fifteen thousand feet, with glacial lakes and semi-tropical valleys hidden throughout. It is untamed land, but also a botanical and human crossroads for Central Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East. The headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers begin in the foothills of the Caucasus in eastern Turkey, then the rivers flow down into the Fertile Crescent, home to the first large civilizations such as Babylon and Ur. The Chechnya border was thirty-five miles north of where I stood; Armenia sixty miles south. Though Georgia is mostly politically stable of late, in January 2017 the US State Department had this to say about those nearby parts of Russia: “Do not travel to Chechnya or any other areas in the North Caucasus region. If you reside in these areas depart immediately.” (Emphasis in original).
Alaverdi is in Georgia’s Kakheti province, and a nomadic people called the Kush live in the nearby mountains. Anthropologist Florian Mühlfried spent time with them and found that outsiders struggle to even grasp their religion. “We are Christians. But we also worship stones,” an elderly Kush woman said, as if that explained everything. The stones she referred to are mountain shrines, according to Mühlfried, who is from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. The Kush, who herd sheep, hunt, and forage for wild plants, believe that ogres controlled the region in primeval times, until an army called God’s Children expelled them.
The stone shrines honor the liberators. Mühlfried wrote that men still visit the shrines during summer festivals, when the immediate vicinity looks like a battlefield. “Cut-off heads of sheep and goats, sometimes tossed away over the shoulder with a small prayer . . . lie around next to carcasses in puddles of blood.” Offerings of wine and pastries pile up nearby, and a common Kush toast before drinking wine is “Without our shrines, we would be lost.” Women aren’t supposed to approach the shrines, especially during their periods. Reading about the sacrifices reminded me of the story Vouillamoz told me about the six-thousand-year-old Armenian cave winery, which is only a few hundred miles south of Alaverdi.
It takes a little over an hour to get to Alaverdi from Tbilisi, where I was staying. Along the way my driver stopped at a little roadside farm. An old woman peered into a round brick oven built into the ground. A wooden board was propped against the top, filled with small rows of yeasty, rising dough. She slapped them on the sides of the oven, peeled them off after a few minutes, and piled them in a fragrant row. I bought one, along with some of her homemade cheese, and savored the chewy, salty tastes.
The monastery’s round, 170-foot-tall, cone-topped turret is visible from miles away. The first church was built there about 1,500 years ago to coax the pagan mountain tribes into a new religion, and it kind of worked, except for the worshipping stones part. For almost a thousand years the turret was the tallest in the country; recently a newly built church went higher. Stone walls, fifteen feet high in some places, encircle the entire monastery, and the main entrance looks like a castle built to withstand sieges, with narrow slots for archers to shoot out of. It was all built out of necessity. Roman and Muslim armies invaded Georgia, followed by Genghis Khan. The Persian shah Abbas I invaded numerous times in the early 1600s, reputedly camping in the Alaverdi church for a month and defiling it. During the Ottoman Empire the huge Christian icons on the monastery walls were painted over. In 2008 Russia invaded parts of Georgia.
I made the trip because Alaverdi still practices an early style of winemaking. Georgians use whole bunches of grapes, including the stems, to make wine and then bury it in the earth in large clay jars called qvevri. Qvevri may have inspired the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman amphoras that Mediterranean peoples used to make and store wine. Wooden barrels didn’t come into widespread use until about two thousand years ago. Just as oak barrels impart flavor into the liquid they hold, clay qvevri give wines a distinctive, earthy taste, and also change how they age.
Up close, Alaverdi’s walls are a mosaic of burnt umbers, gray washes, and faded copper highlights. I walked through an arched entrance and came into a huge courtyard. It was a mix of ruins, rebuilding, and crisp new order, with young fruit trees beginning to grow in the grassy sections. Bright green moss and lichen grew in spaces between the stone walkways. A monk named Father Gerasim greeted me. He had a dark brown beard, wore the black garb of the Orthodox Church, and spoke with a calm focus. As we walked along a path he pointed to a small plot of grapevines.
“Now it has been planted with one-hundred-and-four different varieties,” he said, adding that the monks chose grapes that most wineries had forgotten. “It looks quite easy and simple, but that’s not so. Because everything starts with taking care of the vineyard. We do not use any pesticides or chemical additives.” But he resisted some of the labels that have become fashionable in international winemaking in the last ten to fifteen years. “We are not the followers of the natural wine, nor the biodynamic wine styles. We are the followers of the traditional Kakhetian Georgian winemaking technology—which was the first.”
“Natural” generally means farming without pesticides and making wine with no additives, except perhaps a touch of sulfur to guard against spoilage. “Biodynamic” is similar to organic farming, but with an added philosophy that reflects both ancient and modern agriculture. Originating in Germany in the 1920s, biodynamics touts connections between the soil, the plants and trees, and the local animals and insects, as well as using astrological calendars to time work such as planting and harvest.
Ancient rituals still linger in the nearby Caucasus Mountains. Every September Georgians from several ethnic and religious backgrounds—including Muslims—make a pilgrimage to Alaverdi called Alaverdoba. The festival, which now lasts for about a week, was in ancient times a multi-week harvest celebration linked to pagan, pre-Christian moon cults. Anthropologists and church historians have studied and pondered Alaverdoba.
The festival is a touchy subject for the Alaverdi monks, since ritually slaughtering animals is part of the local tradition, and for some years—how long is in dispute—the slaughter was done in or around the church. A 1962 documentary from the Soviet era shows peasants drinking, celebrating, and bringing sheep and other creatures to the festival. One stark black-and-white shot zooms in to a corner of the altar room, showing two bloody and dismembered horned sheep heads on the floor. A man walks in, casually picks them up, and carries them away. The Alaverdi monks imply that such scenes were part of Soviet efforts to discredit the church, but some experts think they are remnants of the ancient moon-cult ceremonies that date back to the dawn of civilization, just like the stone shrines of the Kush nomads, and the cave winery.
Father Gerasim said some of the ruins at Alaverdi were left for a reason. He pointed to a large, low-walled area just outside the main altar room. It was an ancient wine-pressing trough. Archaeologists surveyed the site and dated the remains to the sixth century AD. The trough’s surprising size—about twenty by thirty feet—indicates that large quantities of grapes were used in a system that included stone pipes to carry water and waste to and from the monastery. “This is a tradition passing through generations, from the grandparents to the grandchildren,” Gerasim said of Georgian winemaking culture. “I remember when I was about three or four years old, my grandfather or father took me to the wine cellar every time they went. Wine ties, and tied, the human being to his community, to his land.”
I told Gerasim that I was still trying to understand why grapes and wine are such a fundamental part of Georgian culture, more so than in others. Thousands of farmers still make batches of wine at home each year, using the clay qvevri. He thought for a few seconds and said the location of the old trough provided a clue. The altar room, the oldest part of the church, was built right next to the original winery. Wine wasn’t just part of the religious ceremonies. The vineyard was part of the altar. Gerasim didn’t say it, but I realized something else. The Georgians had merged far older pagan vineyard rituals into Christianity. The extensive wine and grape symbolism in Christianity and Judaism wasn’t a new development, but a continuation of old traditions.
Alaverdi was crumbling not long ago. The Soviets turned the monastery into a truck repair shop, and the monks still find rusty parts buried in the ground. The vineyards of the region weathered challenges, too. Soviet bureaucrats decreed that Georgia’s role was to send huge quantities of wine to Russia and Ukraine, but the focus was on cheap factory-produced booze for the masses. Multinational wine conglomerates got interested in Georgia about twenty years ago, after the collapse of the USSR. Consultants scorned the local grapes, suggesting that the most profitable thing would be to plant Chardonnay, Merlot, and other familiar brands. The Alaverdi monks and Georgian government specialists rejected the advice, reasoning that such a strategy would downplay the distinctive aspects of Georgian wine and put the tiny, cash-poor country in direct competition with established wine producers such as France, Chile, and New Zealand.
In the early stages of rebuilding the winery, Gerasim had some doubts. For many years the monks didn’t have the money to do all the necessary work, and they often talked amongst themselves, anxious whether visitors from abroad and even the local people would understand what they were making. He paused and smiled. “But all the guests who tried our wine were excited.” Over time the local people were, too. “They did recognize that the revival of the winemaking tradition would help them and their own families.”
As Gerasim led me around the monastery I asked myself if Georgia’s cultural obsession with wine grapes represents the human side of a famous botanical theory. In the 1920s Nikolai Vavilov, a legendary Russian geneticist, theorized that the geographic point of origin of any plant can be identified by finding a region that shows the greatest genetic diversity of that plant. In other words, if you think Georgia or the Caucasus was the birthplace of wine grapes, there should be many, many varieties there because they have had the most time to evolve. And in fact Georgia claims more than five hundred varieties of grapes, with still more in Armenia, eastern Turkey, and northern Iran. So perhaps Georgians are so obsessed with wine because they have such a long history of making it—winemaking began there even before writing existed.
An expedition from the Chicago Botanic Garden and other arboretums found that the Caucasus contains 6,400 distinct groups of plants in a region about the size of Minnesota, compared to 18,743 in the entire United States. The botanists said the interaction of plant communities with existing mountain ranges in the Caucasus help explain the profusion. About 1,600 of the plants in the region—a full 25 percent—are endemic, meaning they are found nowhere else in the world. In layman’s terms, the isolated mountain valleys may have helped nurture and protect different species, like natural time capsules.
The region came into existence about twenty-five million years ago, when the African–Arabian and Eurasian landmasses collided. Once separated by a vast sea, they crept closer for hundreds of millions of years, finally buckling upwards to form the Caucasus Mountains. Volcanoes erupted, the ocean shrank, and rivers formed, but in the broadest sense the new region was still a mix of two old landmasses—and all the plants and animals each contained.
That melting pot promoted plant diversity, partly because the geologic parents had both subtropical and temperate regions. As a United Nations report on genetic diversity notes, “This unique situation has made it possible for the Caucasus to be a bridge between eastern and western flora . . . This explains why, in some areas of the Caucasus, species of European or Asian origin grow next to [native] species, adapted to continental, Mediterranean and subtropical climates.” The field report from the Chicago botanic team went further, adding, “[T]hrough eons of tectonic plates pushing skyward, plants continue to be further isolated—which in some cases has precipitated new species.”
Patrick McGovern found Georgian pottery dating to 6000 BC that appears to be decorated with “grape clusters and jubilant stick-figures, with arms raised high, under grape arbors,” and burial mounds near Tbilisi contained ornate gold and silver goblets with depictions of drinking ceremonies. “Grapevine cuttings were even encased in silver, accentuating the intricate nodal pattern of the plant,” McGovern said. Some of those cuttings are on display at the Georgian State Museum in Tbilisi. Saint Nino, a woman who brought Christianity to Georgia in the fourth century, reputedly carried a cross made of grapevines as a shield against visible and invisible enemies. The classic Georgian chant “Shen Khar Venakhi (‘Thou Art a Vineyard’)” was reputedly written by King Demetrius I in the twelfth century. It is still popular at weddings.
I followed Gerasim to what he called the “new” winery, which dates to 1011. A rambling line of clay qvevri rested against the wall, some of them centuries old, and a few craftsmen still specialize in creating the jars. We walked inside. In the front room were signs of the international support that Alaverdi has attracted. An Italian company donated a wine labeling machine, as well as oak barrels for another product, Georgian brandy. I bent down to pass through a low arch into the qvevri cellar, and Gerasim said the ancient design was intentional, “So people have to bow when they enter the room.”
The cellar had old, rough stone walls inset with arched shelf areas, a wood-beamed ceiling, and a tiled floor that was surprisingly bare. There were round holes in the floor above each buried qvevri. Flat stones seal the tops during fermentation, a practical but startling departure from the stainless steel tanks that dominate modern winemaking. “Traditional winemaking in qvevri doesn’t need to be updated,” Gerasim said. “This is a universal, unchanged wine technology. The only novelty that you can bring is to have some equipment that would simplify your work a little bit. The winemaking itself—no changes.” One corner of the wine cellar featured a display that included ceramic drinking vessels and artifacts found on site, as well as an ancient qvevri left buried in place. The monks were rebuilding Alaverdi—and its grapevines—after decades of neglect.
I was excited but a little nervous as Gerasim took me down a stone staircase and into a cool, quiet tasting room. Some of Alaverdi’s wines had been honored at major competitions, but would I love them? Decanter judges said one red “simply had more depth, more flesh, more length and more spice than its competition.”
In the underground tasting room Gerasim took the role of tamada, or toastmaster. In Georgia all formal dinners and events have a tamada who gives a series of speeches. Its origins are perhaps linked to prehistoric wine ceremonies, including human sacrifices. The Greek symposiums, where men of rank gathered to drink, tell jokes, and socialize, may have evolved from Georgian traditions. As we prepared to drink Gerasim said, “I can compare our winemaking to a family with many children. The children look like each other, but each of them has their own individual character. They have some things in common taken from their parents, [which are] the ground, the land, and the grapevine. Still, each wine is an individual person by its taste and aroma.”
Gerasim declared that guests are a gift from God and that the best food and drink in the house are saved for them. His first pour was the most recent vintage of Rkatsiteli, from 2014. It had a deep golden color unlike any mainstream white wine, the result of leaving the skins on for an extended period during fermentation. Some writers use the term “orange wine” to describe such vintages, but Gerasim said “golden” is the correct term. The wine was beautiful and beguilingly different. It had the crisp, fresh drinkability of a white, yet with deep layers of minerality and flavor. It struck me that this wine solved the age-old question of red or white, and that came partly from the qvevri aging process. “They perfectly fit all the dishes at the table,” said Gerasim. A bold claim from Gerasim, but I knew that one of New York’s leading sommeliers agreed.
Levi Dalton, who has worked with legendary chefs such as Daniel Boulud, told Wine Enthusiast magazine that wines produced in qvevri “offer a delicacy of flavors that complement fish, but are structured enough to stand up to a meat course. [. . .] They’re like a get-out-of-jail-free card” for food-and-wine pairings. The British wine writer Simon Woolf was impressed, too. He said the Alaverdi Rkatsiteli had “the most astoundingly complex nose of tea leaves, baked apples, jasmine, herbs and plum compote (and bear in mind my description does not remotely do it justice).”
After the first tasting Gerasim poured an older Rkatsiteli. It had even more depth and flavor, yet was still crisp. Then we sampled wine made from Kisi and Khikhvi white grapes. The Kisi had hints of apricot, citrus, and nuts, while the Khikhvi was both flowery and lightly woody. We moved on to wines made from the Saperavi grape, Georgia’s leading red variety. It had an inky deep color, with a cascade of flavors: cherry and currant, but also spices and hints of tobacco, with all the crispness of the whites. I was overwhelmed.
As we relaxed in the cool cellar Gerasim recalled once asking his father why he drank a large glass of wine at the end of each day. His father replied, “Work a day in my shoes, manage all I have to manage, and ask me.” Now Gerasim understands. I told Gerasim of visiting Cremisan and about all the wineries on my to-see list. “You are a lucky man to visit all these places, and ask these questions,” he replied, then said that according to legend Georgian monks brought Caucasus vines to Jerusalem’s Monastery of the Cross about a thousand years ago. “It would be quite interesting to conduct some research on that.”
I bought a bottle of Alaverdi’s Khikhvi to share with friends. Gerasim invited me to come back for one of the qvevri winemaking conferences Alaverdi holds each fall. He surprised me with some kind words: “Very generous wishes that you tell the true story of all the different people making wine from local grapes.” I was touched also by his feeling of kinship with other winemakers. There really was a far-flung community of people fighting to preserve rare grapes.
On the drive back to Tbilisi the fields faded away in the dusk. A herd of cows blocked the road in one tiny village; in another an old woman scolded a large black calf for some misbehavior. After so much time talking to scientists and reading histories, the Alaverdi wines were a revelation unlike anything I had ever experienced. Vibrantly robust yet elegant, they were like trying fresh, farm-pressed cider or a raw milk cheese for the first time. The impact of the qvevri suggested what ancient wines may have tasted like: completely unlike wines fermented or aged in stainless steel or oak barrels. In retrospect it made sense. If you cook in an electric oven or that same dish over a fire made with smoky chunks of wood, the food changes character. The qvevri wines are like that.
But it wasn’t just the qvevri. Alaverdi was also a testament to how beguiling carefully produced natural wine can be. These wines were unfiltered, made with both the stems and the grape skins left on for the first fermentation. The result was more flavor and depth, not bitterness like you might expect. The tasting was also a reminder that my own preconceptions of ancient wine were too simple, and that much prior commentary had the same flaw. Experts often remark that ancient wine in Greece, Rome, and Egypt contained extra flavorings such as myrrh (a pine resin) or cinnamon to help prevent spoilage. Yet the Alaverdi wine had none of those additives, and it was still wonderful.
The Alaverdi monks believe that wine needs only grapes, wild yeasts, and careful nurturing, and woe to those who imply otherwise. The critic and writer Alice Feiring tells of a German scientist who came to Georgia for a winemaking conference. The scientist commented that native yeasts could cause problems, because bad yeasts might take over the fermentation. One of the Alaverdi monks stood up and demanded, “Are you saying that G-d did not provide the grape with everything it needed to make wine? There are no bad yeasts.”
In Tbilisi I saw how Georgia’s vibrant grape culture was attracting winemakers from all over the world. I had dinner with Patrick Honnef, who had left behind a comfortable job in Bordeaux. We ate at a restaurant called PurPur, which is located in a grand nineteenth-century building, with high ceilings and a faded-chic fin de siècle feel.
“I came here first in 2009, and I fell in love with this country very fast,” he said. “As a wine enthusiast it’s just a beautiful country. Everybody said, you’re in Bordeaux, the paradise of wine business. But people don’t understand. I’m very happy to be out of Bordeaux. I’m ten times more happy because as a winemaker you can realize yourself far more—you can create here. You can step forward quite fast because the potential of certain varieties is just outstanding.”
Honnef loves great French wines, but just like me he sought something different. “As a winemaker in Bordeaux, come on,” he said, making a gesture of frustration with his hands. “The only goal there is to match tradition. Stability is the goal, not innovation.” Now Honnef is the winemaker for Château Mukhrani, the ancestral sixteenth-century estate of a Georgian prince, located not far from the city. In the 1800s Mukhrani supplied wine to the tsars of the Russian Imperial Court. In 1974 archaeologists discovered the remains of an ancient town nearby, which included a palace mosaic from about AD 150 that depicts a feast of Dionysus, including vines, bunches of grapes, and goblets of wine. Mukhrani was abandoned during the Soviet era, and it wasn’t until 2007 that international investors started to rebuild the chateau and its winery.
PurPur combines local dishes with classic French-style cooking, and Honnef ordered a pkhali appetizer, which is a sort of pâté made from ground walnuts and different vegetables, such as beets or spinach. The green version looked like pesto; the red version was like nothing I’d ever seen. They both had the taste of eating fresh vegetable shoots straight out of a garden—subtle yet vibrant and alive. I asked about the local grapes as we shared a bottle of Mukhrani’s 2013 Goruli Mtsvane, a white that is crisp but full, with peach and citrus flavors. It paired well with the pkhali, and was subtly different than any European wine I’d ever tasted.
Some of the Georgian wines age well, too. A colleague found a case of 2000 Saperavi, and Honnef was impressed. “To taste these wines, for me, was a proof that indeed there’s a big potential for aging. It’s a pity to drink it very early,” he told me. Bordeaux Merlot develops truffle notes after five or six years, while Saperavi gets raspberry-mulberry overtones. Château Murakami also makes some wines that blend local varieties with international ones.
All the positives doesn’t mean winemaking in Georgia is easy. “A lot of people [here] did something because their father, their grandfather did it the same way. They don’t know why they’re doing it,” Honnef said of local customs. When he moved to Georgia full-time in 2013, he found that many wineries and grape growers didn’t practice basic hygiene, and that despite the quality of the indigenous varieties many wines were “just bad” because of bacteria and related issues. Tradition by itself doesn’t guarantee good wine, it is just a starting point.
Honnef’s Bordeaux resume didn’t carry much weight with rural farmers either. “They’re very proud people. I think it’s mostly they’re afraid of change. But if you show them, and it works, and you show them that it works—you can convince them to try new things,” he said.
There are a mix of challenges and benefits. “You have a lot of consultants coming to Georgia, and half of them saying, yeah, you have to plant some international varieties because they’re well-known,” Honnef said. He gets frustrated sometimes because things don’t move fast enough; then reflects on all the country has gone through since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet working in a small country has plusses, too. Just before our dinner he met with Georgia’s prime minister to review progress in the industry. Despite a modest budget, the National Wine Agency travels to conferences all over the world to give tastings.
Like Father Gerasim, Honnef said he was excited by my plans to explore ancient and forgotten grape varieties. I was, too. Grapevines were everywhere in Tbilisi, literally and figuratively. They grow out of sidewalks, crawl up doors and along balconies, and ramble along working-class courtyards where laundry hangs out to dry. Some people even trained masses of vines into a kind of natural roof for open-air patios. I was used to seeing precisely controlled vineyards. This was different. Georgia was a living textbook. People loved the vines, and I could see it in their art, poems, music, and wine.
But that passion hasn’t yet uncovered indisputable proof of the origin of winemaking. Georgians insist their country is the birthplace; neighboring Armenia does, too. Early in my visit I met with Giorgi Tevzadze of the National Wine Agency, which is located in a modest Soviet-era building. Tevzadze told a story that illustrates how difficult preserving rare grapes is, even in a place as wine obsessed as Georgia. During one visit José Vouillamoz found some possibly special vines not far from the wine agency, and he took a sample. “But the evidence that he took, the materials, it unfortunately cannot be traced now,” Tevzadze said, because the owner has since destroyed the vines and planted the area with different varieties.
I’d fallen in love with Georgian wines. But would science ever be able to decode the family tree of all five hundred local grape varieties, known or unknown, or their links to Europe? Sean Myles, the Canadian geneticist I had spoken to a while back, explained the challenge. “There was some kind of domestication event over in the East, in the Caucasus, and as the grape was brought over into Western Europe it began to mix with local wild grapes. Wherever the grape ended up, it ended up at least having some contribution from local, wild material,” he told me. So German Riesling grapes have more links to their native wild relatives—but they also contain a trace of the Caucasus ancestry.
Part of the barrier to decoding the wine grape family tree comes down to money. “Sure, they might be interested in the origins of Pinot Noir, but they’ve got bigger fish to fry,” Myles said of large corporations, echoing what I’d heard from other scientists. “They’re not going to go dish out a bunch of cash for somebody to do some research . . . that doesn’t impact their bottom line.” I began to wonder if the origins of wine grapes would remain shrouded for the foreseeable future.
Myles brought up something else. As we plant the same grape varieties all over the world and prevent them from cross breeding, that locks in flavor profiles many people love, but also stops evolution. Myles elaborated, “The bad side to that is the pests and things that are attacking those vines continue to evolve. That is going to be the potential demise of the entire international wine industry as we know it today. The industry is losing the arms race to the pathogens that continually evolve and attack the grapevines. It’s really only a matter of time. If we just keep using the same genetic material we’re doomed.”
I’d thought of rare grape varieties from a perfectly selfish point of view. I wanted new flavors and different stories. Myles showed me that diversity is a matter of vineyard health and survival, too. The most notorious example of crop monoculture is the Irish Potato Famine. By the 1800s most people in Ireland had started planting just one potato variety, propagating it from shoots. The potatoes were the same each year, which wasn’t a problem until the rot disease Phytophthora infestans showed up in the 1840s, destroying entire harvests and leading to massive starvation. I wouldn’t wish ill on any grape variety, but that might be what it takes to make industry leaders change their ways.
After I returned from the Caucasus, I took comfort in reading old histories and legends. Many of them do identify the region as the cradle of winemaking. The Greek historian Herodotus described how Armenian traders brought wine to Babylon in the fifth century BC:
The boats which come down the river to Babylon are circular, and made of skins. The frames, which are of willow, are cut in the country of the Armenians above Assyria, and on these, which serve for hulls, a covering of skins is stretched outside . . . They are then entirely filled with straw, and their cargo is put on board, after which they are suffered to float down the stream. Their chief freight is wine, stored in casks made of the wood of the palm-tree. [. . .] When they reach Babylon, the cargo is landed and offered for sale; after which the men break up their boats, sell the straw and the frames, and . . . set off on their way back to Armenia.
An obscure book added even more color to the Caucasus legends. Nart Sagas: Ancient Myths and Legends of the Circassians and Abkhazians is a collection of age-old folktales, including one about the origins of wine. The Narts were a primeval race of demigods who battled giants, witches, and various supernatural forces. They lived in a land of plenty, except for one thing: the giants controlled all the fruits and vines. Obsessed with what they couldn’t have, the Narts decided to go to war over the fruits and vines, no matter what the cost. Another Nart saga may be one of the earliest chronicles of men behaving badly while drinking. It is disconcertingly accurate:
The Old Narts stood over a barrel of white wine.
Of the harvest god they uttered many blasphemies.
Aleg, the leader, told many false stories.
Warzameg, as though true, agreed with them.
Yimis boasted as was his habit.
Sawseruquo composed a hundred evil schemes.
Nart Chadakhstan dreamed of manly deeds.
In all they drove white wine down to the barrel’s seething bottom.
Then Nart Pataraz crashed through the door and crushed a few people’s ribs on his way to the center of the room. He launched into a seemingly endless series of boasts about bloodshed and mayhem and laid down a challenge: The mystical barrel of white wine would judge what he said. If it was all lies, the barrel would dry up. If it was truth, the barrel would overflow.
The barrel overflowed, of course.
Tastings
You’re probably going to have to go all the way to the Caucasus Mountains to taste Alaverdi’s wines, which are made in relatively small quantities. Luckily many other Georgian wines are available in the United States, such as Pheasant’s Tears. Astor Wines & Spirits in New York City stocks several Georgian wines, and sells them online, too: www.astorwines.com.
Georgian Wine House, an importer based in Maryland, lists numerous stores around the country that stock bottles of Georgian wine: www.georgianwinehouse.com.
If you decide to explore wines from the entire Caucasus region, don’t forget Armenia (Zorah Wines, located near the six-thousand-year-old cave site; www.zorahwines.com) and wines from Turkey. VinoRai, a Seattle importer, handles several Turkish wines: vinorai.com/turkey. Look for grape varieties such as Boğazkere (trans: “Throat Burner”) and Öküzgözü (trans: “Bull’s Eye”).
Alaverdi Monastery Cellar (Buy whatever year you can find from Alaverdi!)
Mtsvane Kakhuri (amber; made in qvevri)
Rkatsiteli (amber; made in qvevri)
Saperavi (red; made in qvevri)
Kisi (golden; made in qvevri)
Château Mukhrani
Goruli Mtsvane (white)
Rkatsiteli (white)
Saperavi (red)
Reserve Royale Saperavi (red)
Pheasant’s Tears
Rkatsiteli, 2015 (white; made in qvevri)
Saperavi, 2015 (red; made in qvevri)
Mtsvane, 2015 (white; made in qvevri)
Chinuri, 2015 (white)
Tavkveri, 2015 (red; made in qvevri)
Armenian Wines
Zorah Karasì (red, from Areni grapes; made in concrete to lend a qvevri-like quality)
Zorah Voskì (white, from Voskèak and Garandmak [trans. “Fatty Tail”] grapes; made in concrete)