In 2011, before my first visit to Georgia, the wine director for the fancy restaurant Le Bernardin sat in my living room for the purpose of tasting some qvevri wines. I poured the Pheasant’s Tears 2009 Rkatsiteli, which I thought lovely. He was amused, but was he smitten? No. In all fairness his clientele were the posh. Without a doubt that amber-colored wine with some tannic scratch would be too shocking for the Manolo Blahnik set. But more used to wines made naturally, I was thrilled by them. Feeling almost bored by the wines around me, these seemed fresh.
Tasting the qvevri wines that first time was the beginning of infatuation for me, and it was with a quick yes that I agreed to travel to Georgia to give a talk on natural wines at the First International Qvevri Symposium in 2011. I traveled like crazy; I had long ago stopped counting the stamps in my passport, but I hadn’t experienced this sense of adventure on this level for a long time.
When explaining my next trip to my brother on the phone, I said, “The conference is hosted by the Georgian Orthodox Alaverdi Monastery, a sixth-century church, and a cleric named Bishop Davit — a wine loving ex–cave dweller — and it’s funded in part by USAID.”
“It sounds like that Sacha Baron Cohen movie, Borat, doesn’t it?” he laughed. “This is really funny.”
But it soon got serious, even though entering the former Republic of Georgia was like stepping through the wardrobe. Most international flights land and leave at three in the morning. I felt the astonishing, surreal whoosh as we lowered to the ground into the land of saturated colors and flavors. How could I not connect to a place that counted a medieval epic poem about friendship, sex, and unconditional love as one of its national treasures? I had prepared for the trip by reading it: The Knight in the Panther’s Skin by Shota Rustaveli. This is the story of how two accidental friends for life risk limb and soul to find a woman who has stolen one of their hearts. Like much of Georgian history, it is ancient. The emotional memory, however, is fresh.
After traveling for so long, I collapsed in exhaustion an hour before dawn in a lopsided bed in a tiny hotel just outside the old city of Tbilisi. The crumble of its stone reminded me of Fez but without the calls to Allah and without the donkeys. A few hours after landing, I groggily emerged into the brilliant sunlight and took in the landscape dominated by a fifty-foot statue. It was a 1950s Soviet-era rendition of Mother Georgia. One of her hands was on a sword, and the other held a piala, the terra-cotta wine cup. She loomed over the other super-modern structures, like the steel and glass worm-like bridge crossing the Kura River.
On the way to lunch at a local bean restaurant, I savored the cheesy bread, khachapuri. I had my first glimpses of the flavors and colors. I felt an affinity with it all. Why? In part because I so often feel too emotional to live in the real world, but in Georgia everyone seemed like a mythical human who felt first and thought later. I felt at home. Perhaps my grandfather was from Georgia instead of being a White Russian from across the Black Sea because the faces, the food, and the colors all seemed so familiar. The dumplings the Georgians call kinkhali were like my grandmother’s pillowy kreplach. The beans reminded me of a vegetarian cholent. The pickles on the table reminded me of any meal of my childhood home. Then the way everyone spoke with such excitability made me feel that everything about Georgia was like a blood tie. Whether or not there was a genetic or spiritual link, Georgia, in the shadows of the Caucasus Mountains, burrowed under my skin.
It was in Tbilisi that I met John H. Wurdeman V, one of the event’s organizers and the co-owner of Pheasant’s Tears winery. I found him to have an uncanny likeness to Russell Crowe, with a heavy straight blond ponytail and sky blue eyes. I was already acting on instinct, and I skipped the bus to the conference and claimed my seat as passenger in his car and claimed John as my friend, only to find a copy of my book, Naked Wine, in his glove compartment. Yes, I was flattered.
Not only was he an adept translator, but he was also a natural raconteur. Over the course of the next few days, stories bled out of him. The one about how an expatriate, a peasant, and a bishop banded together to bring life back into a wine culture ready to breathe its last breath grabbed me the most. His own story was practically made for the movies, and it went mostly as follows.
John, originally from Virginia, a vegetarian-from-birth son of hippies, was also a talented painter who had studied art in Moscow. After graduation, in search of the multilayered folk music of Georgia, he hitchhiked with his easel; working his way through the flatlands, he reached the hilltop town of Signaghi.
The year was 1996, a time when Georgia was post-perestroika and just settling down from the civil wars that had bloodied the country. The hope for plumbing and peace was beginning. As the sun had long set, traveling John needed a place to sleep. There was one choice in the town.
“I walked in. The electricity was out — lights were always going out back then,” John told me. “I asked the man at the desk for a room. There was one regular priced and one deluxe for just a few pennies more. I took the deluxe. But when I got up there, there was no water or heat, of course, because of the electricity outage. I went back down and asked what the differences in the rooms were. Blowing smoke in my face, as if it was perfectly obvious, he said, “One has a view and one doesn’t.”
“In the morning I looked out the window. Fog sat on the hills below, the clay rooftops of the village peeked out from it. The air was still. The landscape was majestic. The sun was trying to shine on the Caucasus. How could anything be so beautiful?”
Always decisive, he vowed to move there. Just like that. Not only did he fall for the location, but in time he also fell for a town girl, Ketevan, a folk dancer and singer. However, she wouldn’t marry him until she had the blessing of her spiritual father, the aforementioned Bishop Davit. One day, when the cherry blossoms burst, she took him to see her bishop, a man with a wild beard and sensitive, all-knowing eyes.
The verdict was a happy one but came with a caveat. If John agreed to see the bishop once a month to talk about art and spirituality, then yes, the couple could marry and start a family. Eventually they would also talk about wine and the bishop’s plans to rehabilitate the old winery at Alaverdi.
One child was born and then another. John and his wife traveled the regions collecting songs, tunes, and folk traditions. He painted. They didn’t have money, but life was rich.
One day, while John was in the field at work, a brush in hand, a farmer on a noisy tractor drove up to him. The man was devoid of artifice, and after the gamarjoba, the obligatory greeting, he skipped the small talk. “I know about everything you’re doing for folk traditions,” the man on the tractor said. “Wine is no less important. You and I? We need to talk.”
The tractor was so cacophonous that John yelled back, “How can we talk when I can barely hear you over that engine? Can’t you turn it off?”
The man shouted back, “My starter is busted. Listen, my name is Gela Patashvili from the village of Bodbis Khevi. Everyone knows me. Come to dinner tonight and we’ll talk.” Gela drove away.
But John, having never agreed, stayed home that night with his family.
Not long after, there was a knock at John’s door at dusk. Harvest was under way, and John was surprised to see Gela, fresh from crushing grapes. John invited him in for a bite, for a glass of spirit, but Gela stayed at the door. “You have children; bring them to harvest and then stomp the grapes and see the magic, and then you will reconsider.”
John said he would bring them by. But he didn’t.
The end of harvest was near. Once again at the end of a long day there was a knock at John’s door. Once again, it was Gela. “You don’t come to the grapes; I bring the grapes to you. And then we’ll talk.”
Gela had ferried with him in the back of his truck a quarter of a ton of grapes as a present for John. The artist had no choice but to gather his family and stomp them up. The juice was poured into glass jars to ferment and bubble away as there was no access to a qvevri. But John knew when he was beaten. He agreed to have dinner with the determined farmer and hear more about what he had to say. He was convinced that at most he’d come away with a new friend; a life in wine was certainly not for him.
John and Gela sat outside in the night, and Gela’s mother prepared a convincing meal. They drank wine. They drank the local brandy, called chacha, the eau-de-vie or grappa-like elixir Ketevan declares is the direct path to heaven. Gela pled his case. He said they’d been making wine in his family as far as he could trace back — some eight generations. Then Gela told him, “Georgia has 520 grape varietals that grow nowhere else in the world. We’ve survived invasions. We survived when marauders yanked out our vines and burned them. We survived the phyloxera, the louse that eats the vines, by replanting. Then the Soviets reduced our grape varieties to those that were easiest to grow, forgetting the others. They moved the vines from the hills to the flats. If that wasn’t bad enough, there are people wanting to imitate international style, Bordeaux-like wines. Merlot and Cabernet! In my country! They are making wine in small barrels, not in the qvevri. This is wrong. Our value is in keeping the character of our wines true to their origins. We have much to offer the world, and if someone doesn’t start focusing on our traditional methods, we risk being lost.”
John had other priorities, like art, music, and making a living. He was smart enough to know that winemaking wasn’t the best way to ensure his family’s security. And he wasn’t a farmer. He told Gela he would think about it but did not. Gela was undeterred.
In the next conversation they had, he appealed to John’s second weakness after art: music. “You collect songs — if they don’t get recorded and taught they will die out with the older people. It is the same with the vine. The last people who know the old remedies for taking care of them without chemicals are dying. We need to preserve the knowledge so it can continue. I can do it. I know I can do it. But I need some investment. I need help to buy some land.” Then he added, “I need you.”
John was not all that seduced by the winemaking experience — he loved to drink, but he had his art on his brain. However, John had a spiritual bent. He didn’t have to be swallowed up by a big fish like Jonah to take a hint. He recognized destiny when he saw it. He knew how essential wine was to feastings and gatherings, but it wasn’t until that moment that he understood it as an essential thread in the fabric of the country and the people. The painter pulled together some funds, and his small vineyard was started. In the end, the Pheasant’s Tears wine project took off and, with eleven organic hectares, became a much bigger part of John’s life than he had ever thought it would or should. “As if I didn’t have a hard enough time being an artist, now I have two professions that are difficult to make money at,” he joked to me.
“When was that?” I asked as we sat in a traffic jam of sheep, which were blocking the road as we headed to his wine bar in Signaghi. This was one of the reasons a thirty-mile trip could take two hours.
“Vintage 2007,” he said.
“And why did you decide to work with qvevri? Back then many people were using oak.”
Working on the cheap, he and Gela went to an abandoned winery and found some intact qvevri to dig up and replant, allowing them to officially launch their winery with the 2007 vintage. “In 2009 I took the wines — we were only making reds then — to the fair in Prowein in Germany. The feedback I got was that a wine like that could be made only in wood barrels if I was to be taken seriously. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have the money for them. At the time, new oak barrels were $1,000 each. It was the bishop who set me straight.”
“Really?” I asked as we started to move on the road, as if wading through the animals.
“He told me that putting a qvevri wine in wood was like putting a bow tie on a Georgian warrior. The bishop was firm on that: “Stay with tradition. Keep true to the Georgian way. Do not improve on what has been tested. Use no additives. Use qvevri. Have faith.” In fact he placed his two hands on me at once, saying, “I bless you for never using oak on a qvevri wine.”
He gave John the confidence to follow his instinct.
On our last day the symposium group was having lunch in a Kakhetian winery when another group joined us. These were wine professionals brought over by USAID — wine masters, wine educators, and one man in particular that raised a fury in me. At the time he had just sold off his company, Vinovation, to his brother, but he was still connected to it. This company sold reverse osmosis machines, among other technologies. A reverse osmosis machine is something I’d always called a torture chamber for wine. Nothing more than a high-powered filter, it could separate the water and alcohol out of wine so that winemakers could reconstitute the end product to their specifications. Such a procedure is the antithesis of natural winemaking, and I was terrified. I saw this man convincing peasants and government officials that this was the path to success, and if they believed him, honest wine in Georgia would be lost. So I lost all sense of humor and went over to him.
“Hello, Mr. Reverse Osmosis; what do you think of the wines?”
“They need some help,” he said.
“Not yours. I just want you to know that if I see you peddling your machines to Georgia, you’ll have to contend with me.”
I left the country knowing I would return but not foreseeing how often.
Over the next months John decided to instigate getting my book, Naked Wine, published in Georgian. I developed a plan and made sure that Gela and John were invited to France for the debut of their wines at the Burning Man of the natural wine world, La Dive Bouteille. I wanted their wines to go to the right people, and the right people would be at that tasting, held yearly on the first weekend in February in the Loire Valley.
That winter I rendezvoused with John and Gela in Paris. We had some walks, a few meals. Gela’s first time in France had to be far less colorful than my first time in his country, and he was far less charmed. In fact he was dismayed by the weak wines and the small portions, as well as the meat, which tended to be quite bloody. (“I’m a man, not a wolf,” he told John when we were at a wine bar in the Nineteenth Arrondissement.) After a day he was out of patience with concrete; he wanted vines. We started our drive out to the Loire. The first stop was in the little village of Les Montils, just at the beginning of chateau country, at the winery of Thierry Puzelat. Les Montils once had been thriving; now there was just one lonely domaine, that of the Puzelat brothers, rock stars of natural winemaking. Thierry, nearly fifty with impish, high-school-tow-haired-boy good looks, is a good solid drinker, one who likes to fistfight so much that he seems to always sport a good-natured blackened eye and even chuckles about it. I was matchmaking, and I was pleased with myself. After a visit to the vines we ate lunch at Thierry’s wife’s L’Herbe Rouge Inn. Gela was adventurous and ordered the boudin noir. I felt for him as he picked mournfully at the bloody snake of sausage on his plate. But Thierry didn’t notice. “So, do you have your wine with you here?”
John did, in fact. He returned from his car with the Pheasant’s Tears wines, as well as those of Georgian friends. When the wines had been tasted, I could see Thierry had immediately grasped the situation without needing an explanation about the amber colors, the exotic waxiness, or the absolute life of the wine. It was clear: he was one of them; they were comrades in making wine naturally. He said, “How much do you have? I’ll take everything!”
John was confused; was Thierry buying all that wine just for himself? The man was a big drinker, but still that was a lot of wine.
I hadn’t yet disclosed to the visitors that Thierry not only made highly regarded wine, but also imported it. Thierry further clarified, “At the Dive, when people ask you who imports your wine to France, you tell them it’s me.”
At the caves where the Dive was held, Thierry was also showing his own wines, and he was hyping up the Georgians as if they were the new debutantes. That was the beginning of the export expansion of many of the newer Georgian wines as the importers from several countries made their orders. It was a transformational moment for the Georgian wine industry.
During the trip back to Paris, with the glow of that success and with John in the front seat translating, Gela turned his intensity on me. He was insistent on getting my life straight. What I needed was a Georgian husband, to ensure I moved myself to his country. “Good luck with that one,” I said. I had recently decided to embrace my singledom and marry the bottle and the vineyard instead of a man. Not that there weren’t those who had come around, not that I hadn’t loved deeply, but at that point men my age seemed too old and men that were younger were way too young. Then he decided I should stop the life of the struggling writer; what I needed — even if I was going to stay living like a refugee in my New York City Lower East Side walk-up with a tub in the kitchen — was to open a wine bar stocking all of my friends’ wines. We drove onward to Paris as Gela continued fixing me and the world. We had no common language, but we knew each other in another way; we would defend each other to the end. It was just instinct.
Perhaps Gela forgot about his great plan for me the night I finally got to go to his house in Georgia and saw him as the prince of his own domaine. Up to that moment I had only seen him as John’s partner; this was to be the other side. As the night closed in on the pea-sized early summer grapes, Gela, browned and fit from working the vines, came to welcome us to his home, where he was to be in charge at the very table where he had taken hold of John’s destiny. With his dark almond eyes, Gela looked more like a Persian royal than a winemaker. Though I was still stuffed from lunch — enjoyed with Gela’s uncle in the woods next to the bee boxes of some itinerant honey makers and which included the tasty, brick-like cornmeal pucks called mchadi — I couldn’t help but look forward to the meal Gela’s wife and mother had prepared for us. The long table was set up outside of the house, and there was barely anything laid out on it, but I wasn’t fooled; I knew what was coming. It was going to be a very long night.
Georgians rarely eat. They feast. And these festive spreads are called supra. With Gela’s uncle I understood that this ritual was religion, and religion meant feasting. Elderly and hunched over, he said to me at his very rustic house, “I live for feasting.” And feasting costs money. “Perhaps I should have saved, but life without feasting is meaningless,” he said.
The Georgians believe their fairy tales, and one of them is how the land was created. God, you see, was divvying up the land to the people of the world, but the Georgians were too busy feasting to show up to get their cut. When they finally showed up, presumably well fed and having had copious amounts of wine and in tremendously good spirits, they explained their situation with such heartfelt innocence and passion that God realized their sincerity and their enthusiasm for the culture of food and wine, so he gave them the piece he was reserving for himself: Georgia. This might be a story, but the commitment they bring to drinking and eating is a force to deal with. It is no less elaborate than a Jewish seder. It’s as if the feast is before God.
The supra has rules, and wine is its core. It is a custom that when honored guests arrive, the qvevri is broken into. I followed Gela into the winery, where he knelt down and removed the glass plate on top of the mouth of one vessel, removed the clay seal and then the wooden round board, and siphoned off enough Rkatsiteli for a small army. It was needed.
Friends and relatives started to appear. We had grown to about eighteen people and took our seats at the long table under the star-flecked sky; Gela’s mother and wife had sent out the first dishes. Tomatoes and cucumbers; bundles of parsley, dill, and tarragon; and jonjoli (pickled wild capers that aren’t in fact capers but flowers of the bladderwort tree) were on the table, and our host immediately stood up at the other end of it to lead the feast. He was stepping into roles in which I’d never seen him: patriarch of his home and tamada, the toastmaster.
That word, “tamada,” translates into English poorly. In truth, the role is closer to a rabbi teaching Talmud study than some comedian presiding over a roast. The word might have come from the remote part of the country, Svaneti, where most archaic forms of the Georgian language are kept alive; it was there they used the word tamta. A tamta was a work leader in the fields who led the work songs. That very same person, a village wise man or elder, would often be the tamada — a term that can be translated as the “leader of the table” and an inspiration for all appetites, including the intellectual.
When I pressed John for more information, he got very Talmudic about the word. Since I spent twelve years in an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva, this kind of symbology was all very familiar to me. “Spelled backward,” he said, “‘tamada’ means ‘Adam,’ who was the first man, but it also means ‘of the earth’ or ‘of the clay.’ Clay is also material for the qvevri. There is a hierarchal structure to the feast in which the tamada takes charge of introducing various philosophical subjects for discourse. He oversees which toasts will be drunk from which vessels — the horns called kantsi, silver ladles, and clay bowls among some possibilities — or drinking vakhtangur-style. That’s the practice of drinking with interlocking arms. He also will appoint an alaverdi toast, which means the toast is passed on to a specific person who is delegated because the tamada believes that person has something pertinent to add to the discussion. The khorumi, or pagan priest, would use the tamada role to expound on various mystical subjects in pre-Christian times, a usage that was eventually absorbed by the Christian tradition.”
No wonder that Georgian feasts are often compared to an academy of learning, a tradition said to stem from the monastery of Ikalto. There the abbot would introduce subjects for discourse in the form of a toast that always delivered important life lessons.
No meal is complete without a series of such toasts, like blessings or Talmudic philosophical offerings. After each toast, cups are knocked back. The silver tipped cow or mountain goat horns, kantsi, are passed around and emptied into mouths. It is essential.
There is almost a religious adherence to the hierarchy of the toast. An early one starts with an announcement, such as, “I want to drink to Georgia.” From drinking for their country the toasts evolve to cover almost every aspect of life including drinking for the children to drinking for nature, for art, for beauty. Early on in the supra there is always a toast for those who are no longer here: “For our ancestors, for our loved ones who have passed on, for the people who made us and are no longer drinking with us,” John started to interpret for me as Gela made the memorial toast.
That is a solemn moment, meant to acknowledge lost loved ones. It was inevitable that I would think to my own losses, present and future. On my first trip to Georgia I received a message that a mentor of mine had died, and on this trip to Georgia the threatening illness of my brother was ever present. I had much to cogitate on during this time of the meal.
I imagined my older brother beside me. When we visited together, we became children, of one mind, as close as ever. Yet we had very few shared memories as adults; there were no holidays as a family, just those times when he came out east to see me and our mother. I don’t know how that happened. It was Gela who had said vines made more sense to him than many people. The vine has a soul. If the plants don’t feel loved, they don’t give results. “I’m not talking about drinking,” Gela would say. “I’m talking about a relationship.” My brother is the rational one to my emotional self; I would have loved to see Georgia drape him in its fairy dust.
Like a skilled actor, Gela held his audience. He told a story about a French winemaker who once asked him what he used for fertilizer. At first Gela didn’t understand because the idea of using fertilizer was so alien. Then Gela said, “Every inch of my soil is soaked with the blood of my ancestors. What do you use?”
He went on: “Georgia has been assaulted for centuries. Marauders rushed in and pulled out the vines. Our people were killed. My land is filled with the blood of my ancestors. But this is the strength of the Georgian wine, from our blood-soaked earth. This is our terroir. We had amazing ancestors, and we are walking in their footsteps. We know this. We’re always looking for a special result. Why? Our ancestors were real people and lived for real reasons.”
Gela expounded further: “But a real person looks for reality in life, constant and powerful. If Georgia didn’t have something real about it as an intrinsic quality, it wouldn’t be alive today. And we, John and Gela, are not the people who have kept the tradition alive. We are just normal people. We open our hearts; what we create we give to you, and if the wine is popular, it’s because of its authenticity.”
The table that had been nearly empty at the beginning, with nothing more than the required plates of fresh herbs; braids of tarragon, parsley, and onions; and cucumbers and tomatoes, was rapidly piling high with food: fried eggplants wrapped around garlicky walnut paste, dumplings, fish, breads, chakapulis (stews), and the pickles I loved so much.
During a supra, food is never removed. It is said that the supra continues until every inch of a table is covered with plates, often even two layers of them. The toasts continued. John was on constant translating duty. The wine was constantly replenished. I was glad to not be driving later that day.
I asked Gela what he had learned from his trips to France. He, as he always does, came back with a thoughtful answer that I did not expect: “Georgia can compete with the best of European terroirs, but we need to plant at higher altitudes, as people used to do; we need to go higher and plant more on the slopes. There was wisdom in planting where only grapes can survive, where they have to struggle.” If grapes had it too easy, the fruit had less character, just like people.
The poet, winemaker, and wine thinker Ilia Chavchavadze extensively wrote in the late 1800s about wine and the naturalness of the Georgian. One of his comments addressed the notion of land: “We know how to choose the place for vineyards, and it would be impossible for us not to know because cultivating vineyards is not a business that we started yesterday since we have had several centuries experience to make a good choice.”
Great terroir always has some degraded rock, limestone, basalt, slate, granite, and schist, along with particular climates. Up until that moment, all of the vineyards I’d seen were in Kakheti. But there were higher elevations in Georgia. I began to hunger, not for food but to see the other terroirs about which Gela knew.
I reached for the bread. I reached for the eggplant. The food, like the wine, went deep down into me. The snap of a radish, as juicy as a cherry. I can’t truthfully trace my own heritage to Georgia, but there was something about the country that resonated with me. Georgian food has delicacy, as does, for example, the yogurt soup or the rose petal jam. This is a land where flavor has not been bred out. Georgia is a land that bursts with emotion, flavor, and texture, in people, landscape, food, and — so important — wine.
Fried Eggplant with Walnut Sauce
Walnuts are a key ingredient in Georgian cuisine; they’re in sauces, dips, stuffings, and dressings or are just for plain eating. The most typical recipes are vegetables stuffed with a walnut mixture in either a sauce or a paste. Take care; the walnut in Georgia is tender. The closest equivalent I’ve found in the States are foraged hickory nuts. Those have the desired caramel-like note.
I encountered one of my favorite renditions of this recipe at Gela’s the night of the feast. It was simply more fresh and less garlicky than most other examples I’d had, and this is a country not shy of garlic. As with many recipes in Georgia, the preparation relies on a complex mix of spices, including some hard to find outside of Georgia, such as marigold flowers and blue fenugreek. Marigold, often called poor man’s saffron, is one of the lesser known of the edible flowers. It adds a dusty assertiveness to the dish and a subtle but perceptible depth. Blue fenugreek (Trigonella caerulea; called utskho suneli in Georgian, the term translates into the poetic “strange and fragrant smell from far away”) seems to have a symbiotic relationship with marigold flowers; the two are often added in equal parts into the recipe.
As far as wine pairings, who cares? Rarely is wine paired with food in Georgia. You just drink through the meal. There’s so much variety on the table at any given time that it’s ridiculous to try to be classic about it. But if I had to make a stab at it, something with skin contact, Rkatsiteli or Kisi.
Here’s a version based on what I had there. Pomegranate seeds are often used for garnish.
1 cup toasted walnuts
1/3 cup packed cilantro leaves
1/4 cup packed parsley leaves
1 teaspoon ground blue fenugreek
1 teaspoon marigold flowers
1 teaspoon wild oregano or wild thyme
1/2 teaspoon hot paprika
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 small yellow onion, roughly chopped
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 1/2 cups canola oil
4 small Japanese eggplants, trimmed and sliced lengthwise, 1/2 inch thick
1/2 small red onion, thinly sliced crosswise into rings
pomegranate seeds for decoration and extra pizazz
Place walnuts; half each of the cilantro, basil, and parsley; fenugreek; marigold flowers; oregano or thyme; paprika; vinegar; garlic; yellow onion; salt; pepper; and 1/3 cup water in a food processor; purée until very smooth, about 2 minutes. Take care; you want this to be creamy yet firm, perhaps not soupier than tahini. Set sauce aside.
Heat oil in a 12-inch skillet over medium-high heat. Working in batches, fry eggplant, flipping once, until golden and cooked through, about 4 minutes. Transfer to paper towels to drain and cool; season with salt and pepper.
Spread each slice of eggplant with about 2 tablespoons of the walnut sauce and fold in half; transfer to a serving platter and garnish with remaining cilantro, basil, and parsley leaves and the sliced red onions.