The morning my great winemaker handoff kicked off — I was going to visit a number of wineries and winemakers throughout the country — I was sitting on the steps of Soliko Tsaishvili’s house, drinking strong Turkish coffee with the smoking winemaker. Soliko was grizzled and missing a few teeth; it was a look that worked magnificently on the gruffly handsome man. Above us a pomegranate tree was resplendent with its firm, waxy, sunset-orange bell-like blossoms. And around us his place was a lovely mess. A rotted-out, miraculously still functioning Zaporozhets, the emblematic car of the Soviet era, was parked between the house and the winery, where the qvevri were buried.
I had met Soliko during that first conference at a nighttime wine tasting outside of the National Museum. I looked at his wine label, which reminded me of the 7 of Cups in the Tarot deck. That card was about letting go, a wild energy, and it was exactly how his Rkatsiteli, under the label Our Wine, tasted.
Morning was turning into sultry afternoon. Before I lost my concentration to the inevitable endless afternoon of food and drink ahead, I aimed to find out how Soliko, the first of the new Georgian winemakers who worked naturally to export his wines to the rest of the world, had started.
“Ah,” he said, “for that we have to go back to the 1970s and 1980s, when the only kind of wine you could find was the shit made by the state.” He was referring to the kind of wine cranked out by state “factories,” such as the lumbering Factory No. 1 in Tbilisi. Built as a state-of-the-art winery in the 1880s, it was coopted by the Soviets in the occupation of the 1920s. For quite a while that huge factory was known to make relatively good wine.
I was familiar with the factory. Niki had brought me to see it. Then vacated, it was being turned into perhaps some sort of museum or restaurant, but it was still intact with many of the past relics: huge brass chandeliers, gorgeous deep woodwork, and massive mantles. It was an important setting for Falling Leaves, the 1966 wine-based movie of innocence and corruption by Georgia’s most important filmmaker, Otar Iosseliani. Iosseliani filmed most of the action there.
“Especially in the late eighties” Soliko said, “toward the fall of communism, the wine was absolutely poisonous.”
All of this poison started in 1928 with the first of Stalin’s five-year plans. Stalin strove to reach the state’s economic goals in five years through collectivization and industrialization. For agriculture that meant that private land was seized for the greater good of the state. Until the end of communism there would be no more farmers who worked for themselves. Households, not individuals, were allowed to retain one thousand square meters — about half a hectare — for household use; as a result, they were forced to squeeze as much as they could out of the earth, and squeeze they did. Plots were turned into multiuse projects growing their essentials — corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, and grapevines. While commercial wine was the domaine of the state, households could make some for their own use. If a person longed for a career in wine, he or she could have it only in dreams.
By the time of the fall of communism in 1990, the Soviet Union had implemented eleven different five-year plans. But the real damage to wine started in 1971 with the ninth plan. That was when the demand for production was ratcheted up to the untenable. Wine quality plummeted. By the 1980s, according to Soliko, it was deplorable. Only if one could make one’s own or get homemade wine could a person drink good wine. It helped if one had connections.
“As always, everyone in the countryside still grew grapes and made wine in their wine cellars, and most people still used qvevri. They had it good. City people like me? We had it rough. I lived in Tbilisi. You had to pull some strings to find those who had some wine to sell to outsiders.”
“It was a black market?” I asked.
The idea that there was a black market in something as innocuous as homemade wine was inconceivable. To acquire this rarity — good wine — Soliko and his friends asked other friends where they could acquire their favorite drink. Competition was fierce. They finally found a source in nearby Kakheti, but they couldn’t buy enough to get them through the year, so they had to find a better solution: make their own.
After a slug of the muddy coffee, Soliko took a drag on his cigarette. The wind kicked up and blew his gritty smoke into my face. He continued the tale.
In 1988, three years before the Soviets left the country, wine was at its worst. The friends sourced grapes from Kakheti. They crushed the Rkatsiteli and Mtsvane and plunked the juice into glass demijohns. In the end they made about four hundred liters (about 105 gallons). The resulting wines were so much better than what was available that they drank the young wines and drank them all quickly. All were gone by February (they had most likely started drinking them the December before). “But at least we were happy for a few months.” In 1989 there was a massacre in Tbilisi of protesters demanding the withdrawal of the Soviet Union; twenty were killed and two hundred wounded. That resulted in a radicalization of the Georgians. It was the beginning of mayhem: crime, poverty, and civil war. It didn’t end in 1991, when Georgia declared independence. Starting with the fall of communism, there were three wars and a period of thirteen years where there was unreliable electricity and infrastructure. The crime situation was extreme. And while Georgians were eager for private business, no one knew how to go about starting it.
That’s why, for years, instead of vinifying, Soliko told me, they needed to put all their energy into survival. Speaking slowly, he took long pauses as he gazed over my head into the past; he’s not big on eye contact. As the decade rolled away from communism, hope trickled in. Georgians started to consider that peace and stability could be possible. That is when thoughts once again turned to the irrepressible vine.
“We first made Our Wine in 2003, in the true Kahketian way,” he said, referring to the eastern tradition of long skin contact in wine. “Except we didn’t have qvevri. Instead we made that first vintage in a big jug lined with ceramic tiles, like a huge swimming basin.”
Encouraged by the results, the friends went further in fantasy toward reality. Why not form a cooperative winery with five friends, buy a small house in Kakheti, and then acquire some vineyards near where they had been buying those excellent grapes? “I’m a literature specialist,” Soliko (who had been an academic) said. “My job was flexible. I didn’t have to be in Tbilisi all the time. I could be here, taking care of the vines and the wines.” He, unlike others who were from the country and yearned to take on the craft of the grandfathers, had found wine in a different way. He had fallen in love with it. Simple as that.
“That was the beginning. We thought we needed consultants to make really good wine.” In what was a repetitive story with so many of the people I talked to, he added, “When we found them, they all talked yeast and sulfur. This is not what we wanted. We wanted to work with tradition.”
Finally they found Gogi Tushmalishvili, the rare consultant who had his feet planted in the wisdom of the past. Zoliko said, “He would be ninety now. He told us because our vines were where they were, in the Kardanakhi and Bakurtsikhe viticulture micro-zones — historically known as the best terroirs — we had to make qvevri wines the old way.”
The friends followed the old way of farming too, and in describing their work to me, Soliko showed his impatience. “No one should harm nature for profit. There’s absolutely no excuse for it,” he said.
Whether or not their methods stem from the religious conviction for purity, Georgians believe that the soil and wine need to be protected. The Soviets were famous for raping the earth, and they brought chemicals to the farmers to pump up production. But at home, in their own gardens, the Georgians mostly stayed organic. Pollute their own wine? Never.
Oddly enough, in France it was the chemicals that gave rise to the renaissance in natural winemaking. In the 1970s salesmen came around to rural French vineyards and propaganda sales started: winemakers needed additives to make wine, and they needed chemicals to work less in the vineyards. As a result, France went into one of the darkest ages of winemaking in its history, with bereft soils and bereft wines. There was a famous wine tasting in Paris in 1976, celebrated in a book called The Judgment of Paris, where California wine was pitted against the wine of France. California, shockingly, won. Because of a lack of attention in the French vineyards? Perhaps. At the time, one of the most destroyed areas was the Beaujolais. Unlike the Georgians, the French had willingly given up their birthright to making natural wines from healthy vineyards. As soon as they saw what was lost, they went in search of its revival. The natural wine movement took hold because in the late seventies a young man named Marcel Lapierre and his equally young friends were fed up with the poor quality of wine they were producing. They returned to organic, and they started to work minimally in the cellar. They were looked upon as hippie flunkies, but in the end their legacy triumphed; now, almost forty years later, natural wine is a brilliant success. Meanwhile, for the seventy years of communism, Georgia waited in the catacombs, waiting to celebrate its tradition as soon as it could.
As I sat next to Soliko, listening to his story, I had to draw the parallel between the Georgians’ love for their wine and the poem The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, in which two men — Avtandil and Tariel, a knight — who are bound in profound friendship for each other seek, through much adventure and danger, the object of Tariel’s romantic love, the princess Nestan. How could I not see this whole modern-day Georgian qvevri tale as a search for the true love of wine? The devotion was just as passionate. As soon as liberation from the Soviets occurred, the search was on for how to make wine in the true Georgian way.
In another remarkable contrast and parallel, unlike in France, this return to the wine wasn’t led by youth but by elders — or at least those in middle age.
When Gela Patashvili approached John Wurdeman, he was already thirty-three, an age that isn’t ancient but is far from impetuous youth. Driving this wave of artisanal winemaking were those who had been forced to delay their dreams.
The age span of those managing the heavy lifting of change ranged from thirty to seventy. They were creating a vibrant showcase of wine from their country, promoting the organic as superior and offering the lack of additives as a serious alternative. They were gaining places on fancy wine lists, such as Denmark’s Noma and Catalonia’s Can Roca. The Georgian wine revolution against the chemical and the conventional did not belong to the youth.
Soliko suffered no fools, and in his opinion, to damage the earth was not only foolish but also demonic. He added another good reason to work naturally in the winery: “Georgians typically drink two liters a day, so it’s important not to have chemicals that can cause hangovers. Not only that, but during the drinking there are fewer arguments, and the drunk is a softer, gentler drunk.”
I wasn’t sure about the fewer arguments or the softer, gentler drunks. I’ve seen my share of winemakers the mornings after, with their sheepish grins. I’ve seen crazy drinking. The Georgians are not shy, and just because it’s not vodka, it doesn’t mean the kantsi don’t get passed around or the contents don’t get glugged in one shot. It doesn’t mean that the drinking doesn’t get as out of hand as when there’s vodka involved, but this I do know: the wines feel salubrious. They feel healthful in my body. But then, I don’t often guzzle two liters of wine a day as a matter of course. I stick closer to half a bottle.
When even the faintest hint of government stability started to be possible, those waiting in the shadows to pounce on the new winemaking possibilities started to connect through the Georgian organic farming association, Elkana. They also met through Slow Food, the organization founded in Italy and dedicated to preserving traditional and regional cuisines and farming worldwide. The head of the Georgian Slow Food branch was the gravelly voiced Ramaz Nikoladze, who — no surprise — also made wine. When Soliko met Ramaz, he realized they shared the same values. Together they started to sniff out others who had the same passion to work in the old way, making excellent homemade organic natural wine, and who wanted to sell it in the marketplace. Acting as wine missionaries, they pieced together what would become a serious network.
One link they discovered was Ramaz’s uncle, Didimi Maglakelidze. He was past seventy when his face was first illustrated on a bottle emblazoned with the unlikely name for his wine, I am Didimi from Dimi and this is my Krakhuna. He was seventy when his first wine was sold commercially in Italy. Another link was also from the west coast of Imereti, Gaioz Sopromadze. He’s a khachapuri-bellied man and, like many others, in his sixties. He is known for working with the Chavkeri grape on his rich soils.
Thierry Puzelat started bringing Gaioz’s wines into France after discovering them on his first visit to Georgia. “It tastes like chicken ass,” he said to Gaioz, with John translating. “I’ll take it all.”
No one was sure what chicken ass tasted like or if Thierry was referring to raw or cooked chicken ass, but it was true that in Gaioz’s hand the grape did become kind of meaty. Gaioz was happy. Very happy. And he was thrilled to travel to France. In 2013 he went with the others to sell his wines at the Dive Bouteille, the tasting where I had first brought John and Gela. Gaioz was having a hard time refraining from pinching the derrières of the Parisian fairer sex, as if it were Italy in the 1960s. When John intervened and told him to behave himself, he protested; he told me, “But they are just so beautiful!” He was so innocent in his appreciation that it was almost possible to overlook the sexism. Later that week I met up with him and the other Georgians in the Loire, in a beautiful deep cellar packed with a library of vintages dating back to the 1920s. Gaioz was angry, and he spoke in Georgian, so John had to translate: “My grandfather had three hectares of vines. Everything was taken!” He said this with so much emotion that he could have been speaking of recent events instead of those in 1921. “They divided our homes. We were stripped of our land, and it was given to people who had no idea how to work it. They took our cellar. We had bottles just like here,” he said, looking covetously at the vintage upon vintage in the Loire cellar. Then with a sneer he said, “I hate communism and Communists.”
The older man gained a youthful zeal. In fact, Gaioz, who at the time owned only three-quarters of a hectare, started buying new vineyards. Planting new vines at his age? Planting vines he wouldn’t see bear fruit for years? This was optimism of the most undying kind. But in Georgia, where spirituality runs deep, so does commitment to the long term. And if unconditional love and the power of friendship are themes in Rostevili’s The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, so they are for the Georgians and their vines.
Finally the smells of lunch plumed out of Soliko’s house. The food started to be laid out on a table under a cherry tree. Nino, Soliko’s wife, joined us and watched us exclaim over her culinary skill: fritters, mushrooms, and an egg dish that was made with eggs so flavorful, I mused that they must have come from some sort of magic chicken. So much of Georgian wine is drunk and finished before proper aging, but at that lunch we tasted vintages. Soliko held up the 2006 Rkatsiteli and said, “This is my love. This is me.”
Four hours later we were just beginning to think about calling it quits. Lunch in that country easily blends into the next meal. Even though I felt fattened up like a calf, rest was not to be. I had another appointment.
Waiting to make my good-byes, I leaned on the doorpost and watched as Soliko helped Nino clean up — not a usual scene in the country. And as they did, they fell into song, hitting harmonies not heard in other countries, layered like sandstone. I realized that polyphony wasn’t just for entertainment, provided by groups such as Ketevan’s Zedashe, but also part of real life. The tunes and singing were in layers, just as the wine is in layers. This singing and poly-everything is integral to the warp and weft of life there.
In the winemaker relay, with me as the puck, Kakha Bershivili, who speaks not a word of English, took me back to his home. He brought along a friend of his daughter’s, a young winemaker, who would translate for us.
Kakha was a vegetarian violinist who, as soon as he could, also became a farmer and winemaker. A believer in all things natural, he is another member of the “I’m-no-longer-young-but-I’m-leading-the-wine-revolution” team. We stopped off at the market in Telavi and walked down the steps into the bustle, immediately finding stalls where we could stock up on a kilo of mushrooms for dinner. It seemed as if everyone knew I loved mushrooms.
That night, after visiting Kakha’s vines and winery and walking near the river, we settled into cooking and drinking on the porch. With the darkened night the jackals howled increasingly behind the cacophony of the frogs and spring insects. I’ve never heard insects so determined and insistent. On the edge of summer solstice, nature was in heat.
As we talked, I was increasingly becoming interested in the twenty-something translator. A winemaker, he hoped to be off to New Zealand and Burgundy for internships after his enology studies.
“Where do you want to work?” I asked.
He wanted a job in a big factory in Georgia or out there in the rest of the world.
“Really?” I was surprised. “But even after today, hearing the stories and drinking the wines, aren’t you a little curious about knowing how to make wine this way?”
He laughed. He said he loved the wines and their taste but added, “It’s just too much work.”
“Too much work? Aren’t you embarrassed in front of these men, who are decades older than you? They’re not afraid of the work,” I said.
But the boy had been brought up with relatively little struggle, having been born after the fall of the Soviet Union. He didn’t know what it meant to have dreams deferred and then embrace them in middle age. I found myself almost as sad as I had been on that late night with Niki in Tbilisi, arguing with the man at the cooking school. Sure, it’s hard to clean the qvevri, but who in Georgia is afraid of hard work?
“You just want it cushy,” I chided him, and he good-naturedly laughed.
“You can get a job with a big factory, but would you be able to sleep well at night knowing you were making wine you didn’t really want to drink? Wouldn’t you rather make wine like Kakha’s?” I asked, as we dove into some of the brilliant wines from 2009 and his first 2006. Drinking the old and the new, we dug into the mushrooms. Savoring the tomatoes, I worried about Georgia because if the next generation didn’t continue the elders’ labor, would industrial wine triumph? That would be a disaster.
Nino’s Delicious Cabbage Fritters
This recipe, so simple but so flavorful, gives cabbage nobility. It struck me that the fritters were reminiscent of vegetable latkes made in Eastern Europe. Though Nino said the recipe came from her head and was not traditional, in scouring through old cookbooks I came across many a fritter variation from mostly the western part of Georgia. Love the fresh tarragon. Serves four.
1/2 head cabbage
3 carrots
2 eggs
1/2 bunch fresh tarragon
salt and pepper
bread crumbs
oil for frying
Boil the cabbage for 10 minutes. Let it cool and then squeeze it out. Then chop or pulse it in a food processor. Grate the carrots and add to the chopped cabbage.
Add eggs, chopped tarragon, salt, and pepper.
Coat with breadcrumbs to obtain thick mass and shape into fritters. Fry up in oil on both sides in a hot frying pan.
Some call it the Georgian salsa, but I find that calling it the Georgian answer to Morocco’s harissa is more like it. Nino’s was particularly delicious.
1/2 cup walnuts
5 cloves garlic, peeled
1 large red pepper, cored and seeded
1 large celery stalk, including leaves
1/2 pound fresh hot red peppers, including seeds
3 teaspoons blue fenugreek
3 teaspoons dried coriander
3 teaspoons dried marigold flowers
2 teaspoons dill (fresh or dry)
1 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup red wine vinegar
In a food processor grind the walnuts and the garlic until you have a paste. Coarsely chop the celery, large red pepper, and fresh hot red peppers and add them to the garlic and nut paste. Add the chopped herbs and red wine vinegar and pulse to a medium coarseness. Adjust seasonings.