As a writer with poverty always at the door, I couldn’t refuse when the government of Georgia came knocking in August 2013. It wanted something from me, and it wanted it in a hurry before its budget closed for the year. The commission was for a promotional book based on my impressions of the wines and regions of their country. That’s when John Wurdeman Skyped me with a big idea.
“Hey, Alice,” he said. His eyes flashed. “Let’s make ourselves our own little artists’ colony. You’ll bring your computer and notebooks. I’ll bring my easel and paints. Then we’ll go together to Meskheti, Guria, Adjara, regions still unknown to me. It will be great.”
I was trapped in my New York City apartment in the August heat and humidity, and it sounded heavenly. Time to think. Time to create. Time. But I was running out of it on many different levels.
The closer we came to the departure date, problems started to pop up. John’s harvest needed more attention. I couldn’t stay as long as I would have liked. I needed to get my research done and return home. My brother was failing. As his discomfort turned to pain, I found that I, so many miles away from him, took to pacing in my apartment like a lunatic. The thought of potentially missing the last moments I could see him caused even greater panic. He had just been accepted into an experimental program in Arizona, so it wasn’t like I could even see him at all. “Go. Just don’t stay too long,” he advised.
In the end John and I had to shrink what would have been a hearty three-week voyage into five or six days. It was not looking good for indulgent creativity. It would have to be direct to work.
I left that year immediately after breaking my fast — yes, Yom Kippur again, but this time I had spent it in New York City.
Gela Patashvili picked me up, and he had a surprise with him: Camille Lapierre, a bouncy young woman with tight blond ringlets. She had traveled from the Beaujolais to work the Pheasant’s Tears harvest. Camille was the daughter of the man considered the father of France’s natural wine renaissance, the late Marcel Lapierre. There it was, another example of the growing connection between the natural winemakers of France and those of Georgia.
“How’s it going?” I asked Camille, who would leave in a few weeks to deal with her own harvest in the Beaujolais.
“There’s nothing to do!” Camille said. “The winemaking is so simple, I’m underemployed.”
When we got to Signaghi two hours later, I was impatient to get my schedule in order and get on the road again. I was weary from my flight as I waited at the Pheasant’s Tears wine bar. An energetic John put a glass of wine in my hand and stated, “Camille is coming too. Is it all right?”
Camille hadn’t known about this plan for her, but she certainly wasn’t against it.
“Will Gela come too?” I asked.
“He can’t. He has to fly to France.”
“What?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine what would pull Gela away from a harvest that hadn’t quite finished.
At that very moment the qvevris that the craftsman Zaliko had finished were on a truck somewhere in Germany, heading their way to Paris and then to the Loire and the Beaujolais, where Thierry Puzelat and friends waited. Gela was going to help plant at least Thierry’s qvevris into the ground. It was the friendly thing to do. I would have loved to witness Gela, who had no other language than Georgian, dealing with the French authorities.
“Of course I don’t mind,” I replied.
“And,” John added, sheepishly, “I’m sorry. We can’t leave in the morning.”
I had so little time. I needed to make the most of every second. “So we leave in the afternoon?” I asked.
I felt the pressure of the hours when he said, “Sorry; we’ll have to spend another day here. There’s a visitor from California I have to take care of tomorrow.”
Something about the way he said it raised my suspicions. But what the hell; I started to think that maybe I could use an extra day of not being on the road, to get focused before we went into overdrive. And as we were delayed already, I took advantage. “We have time now, so I want to see Lamara,” I said.
The next morning we drove the twenty-five minutes from Signaghi to Lamara Bezhashvili’s house. We passed the ever-present swinging meat carcasses on the sides of endless dusty roads, past the strolling cows and goats, until we made a right turn onto a village side street and parked in front of the high walls that protected her animal-friendly Eden.
I’d last seen Lamara when I was there with John and his family. It was then around the summer solstice; the silkworm houses had been fabulously full and frenzied. The insects, all furry and soft — they had just woken up from their final slumber cycle (they have four sleep cycles) — were as hungry as teenage boys. Pulling branches from the mulberry trees, Lamara had said to us, “No one is allowed in to visit them who doesn’t bring food.” She stuffed our arms with the branches, full of huge leaves, instructing us, “Take these in.” A couple of worms, she said, could decimate a whole mulberry tree in a couple of days.
John’s daughter and I had spoiled the creatures with their favorite delicacy. Later we sat by the an old tree stump, munching on almonds and hazelnuts from Lamara’s trees and drinking the wine she had, left over from the last year’s harvest.
This time, in October, all was dormant, just as it had been the first time I had walked behind the walls into her menagerie in 2012. Lamara’s own wine bubbled away, and her new crop of mulberry fruit chacha was ready to sip. We pushed in the door to her Eden, and there she was, almost age defying. This is in part because of a bubbly childhood sense of wonder and, on top of that, sassiness — beauty and wisdom. I looked at her and thought, Now there’s a woman who embodies the spirit of natural qvevri wine.
Inside her sanctuary, as we sat under the mulberry trees, there was no noise except for the singing birds. In her piccolo-like voice, Lamara told us that, according to legend, the silkworm was a special gift God gave to Job. She was attached to this craft, which had been handed down to her from her ancestors. “The worms give me so much,” she said; “they know when I enter to take care of them; I can feel the change in their spirit.” And, in true Georgian spirit, there’s no waste to be found on a silk farm, and that includes the worm excrement.
“Oh yes,” she said, focused intently on her listener as she spoke, hands waving about for emphasis. “[The excrement] is merely processed mulberry leaves, so what’s so bad about that? A little sack of it under your pillow improves the eyesight, promotes brainpower, removes toxins, and cools blood heat. A little sack near your computer is all you need to intercept the harmful ion waves.”
Then she asked me, “How is your brother?”
“The news is not good,” I said.
Tears welled up in her eyes. There was something here that went deeper than compassion. I wasn’t exactly sure why, though I assumed it was her deeply empathic nature. “I know I could have helped him. He can still come,” she said as three red-winged chickens squawked by.
We moved to the shaded table, and the dishes started to come out. Lamara’s cooking had an unusual delicacy in a country where food flavors are bold. Take, for example, her jonjoli, the perennial standby at any Georgian table. This salt-cured fermented food is addictive for me. Instead of the flowers from the bladderwort bush, Lamara used acacia tree blossoms, which impart a delicious floral quality and which, along with their medicinal properties, are thought to be an aphrodisiac. Her pile of fluffy white cornmeal topped by fresh feta-like cow cheese was very much like the mamaliga of my shtetl relatives. Fueled by her Rkatsiteli, Lamara started to rattle off remedies as if she were channeling them, prefacing her list with, “Every plant in Georgia is used for something.” Walnut leaves are better than nettles for treatment, yarrow leaves are remarkable, and she went on about the power of grapes for all sorts of ailments. She brought out her almost-rosé-colored wine, homemade from the past year. Then we went back to feasting, and she talked about her grandmother.
“What was the most important lesson she taught you?” I asked her, expecting to hear that it was from her grandmother that Lamara had learned her medicine.
“How to love,” she answered, with no hesitation.
It was not the answer I expected. I expected her to tell me that the ancient knowledge she had came from her grandmother.
I had come to realize that when a Georgian gives love, it is full and unconditional. And, giving me another example of unconditional love, Lamara started a toast. “God made the deer, one of the most beautiful creatures, but one day a deer so weary from running away from the wolves cried out to its maker, ‘If you love me so much, why did you make wolf, who is making my life miserable?’ So God took the wolves away, and in time the deer stopped jumping and got fat, lazy, and ugly. And then the deer realized, ‘Dear God, now I see why you made the wolf — so that I would stay sharp and lithe.’ We need to drink for our enemies!”
As I left, Lamara gave me a little plastic bag filled with raw puffy silk. I was supposed to moisten it and cleanse my face with it. “Silk cotton is an antiseptic,” she said, “and will keep your skin youthful.” I didn’t know about that. But I figured if I, like Lamara, started with love, anything could be possible. We said our good-byes and headed back to Signaghi.
After I finished packing my suitcase for our delayed road trip, which was to start in the morning, I walked out of John’s house and past the town square in the still blue evening up to Pheasant’s Tears. There sat the usual United Nations scene — visitors from China, Norway, and even someone from India.
John sat at a table off in the garden, in candlelight, pouring. That’s when I saw the truth about the mysterious visitor from California. There, holding forth over a glass of a wine made from the Kisi grape, was the very same wine consultant who went around talking about postmodern winemaking, advising the use of heavy corrective technology. He was the very man I had warned to keep his hands and machines off of Georgian wines. He had put me up on his website’s wall of shame for my own terrible crime: advocating natural wine. I laughed about that one, but there had been one time in the past year when he had gone too far. Far from laughing, I threatened a slander suit when he wrote lies about me that he was forced to withdraw when I presented the publisher with the truth. As he came toward me, I grew tense.
“Behave,” John’s eyes said to me.
Mr. Reverse Osmosis, as I’d come to think of him, put out his hand to me.
“Under the circumstances, I can’t take that, you understand,” I said. Despite my reputation of being a hard-ass, I am a full believer in peace and rarely hold grudges. But one of the lessons of growing older for me has been that, in truth, some people are trouble. I could be civil, however, as long as I made perfectly sure he knew where the difficulty lay. “Look, let’s make a pact to agree to disagree and leave it at that,” I said, disarming him from the fight he must have thought I’d provoke.
He didn’t know what I was referring to. I clarified: “Decanter magazine? The fact that you purposely put words in my mouth that I never said — for what purpose I cannot and do not want to fathom?”
He murmured some sort of apology. Not feeling that the matter was resolved, I nevertheless took his hand.
“And let’s not try to kill each other,” I added. “Shall we?”
We didn’t speak again, but after that I was better able to share the air with him.
But the Georgian wines were casting their spells. In time, Mr. Reverse Osmosis was so mellow that I wondered whether John had slipped him one of Lamara’s tonics. I watched carefully as he imbibed. The wines he seemed to be enjoying that night didn’t have the digital flavors he promoted back home or in Georgia. Instead they had wild layers. As I stood there observing, I wondered how one could accept these wines in situ but still feel the need to change them instead of encouraging them.
Like dishes at a supra, people kept on piling up, and just as I was digging into some of Chef Gia’s wild creeping vine and piling on the adjika, two Japanese women, photographers, walked in. I had seen them many times before, mostly in France; they hung out in and around the natural winemakers there and had recently developed an obsession with Georgia. Keiko was the small and perky one, Maika, the tall and serious one. I had last seen them just a few months before. There had been an argument. Maika had felt she had to defend Keiko against a man who had insulted her petite partner. Her tactic was to dump a pitcher of Saperavi over the guy’s head. As she drenched him in the blood-red wine, she screamed at him so loudly that we thought someone was going to get beheaded.
With that scene imprinted in my memory, I waved to them and then started to talk to Niki, who sat by me.
I hadn’t seen Niki, the Skinny Buddha, for a while. He’d been absorbed with getting his winery built; time was pressing in on him. As I wrapped my arms around him for a hug, I realized I could feel his bones under my hands. He had been working so intensely that food had become irrelevant.
“Are the qvevri in the ground yet?” I asked.
He shook his head mournfully and said softly, “No.”
“Everyone has picked,” I said, worried about what he would do.
He shrugged and looked upward. I guess it was in God’s hands. “You go to Meskheti tomorrow?”
“Yes!” I answered.
“I’ll come too,” he said.
“But harvest? And getting your winery built! Niki, are you sure?”
“It will be good. No worries,” he said.
It was then that John pulled me aside and asked me if I would mind if the two Japanese women could join our adventure.
“Why not?” I answered. In my mind this was getting to be one long line of a conga dance. I wondered how many more people we were going to add on. That’s the way it rolls in Georgia, whether at the supra or on the road; guests just keep on accumulating.
We were at least thirty people around the long table. The drinking gathered momentum. Out came the kantsis. I’d seen them around in all sorts of sizes, but on this occasion John brought out the mother of all horns. I was worried because once the horns come out, a hangover is lurking on the other side, even if the wine in the kantsis is natural. The only difference is that you can drink more of it before the hangover is achieved.
Our tamada, John, stood up and spoke in a night that was replete with singing and frantic dancing. Nodding toward young Camille, he said, “I am drinking for traditions and for Camille’s father, Marcel, who launched a revolution by looking to the past.” John drained the horn with as much conviction as Russians are known to knock back vodka.
In the spirit of alaverdi (passing the toast), Gela stood up to continue the theme, which was about Camille but also about those no longer with us but who had left legacies.
“The wine my grandfather made was possible because his heart was open,” Gela began. “He had no confession to make and slept well at night. I’m not going to give poison to other people. Like my grandfather, I will give people something natural and wonderful. Marcel was able to give this very thing to the people. He left this life but left his children behind. Camille, we will soak up the love for your father, everything that he wanted to do, and give it back to the world. This will be your life. I want to drink first to the memory of your father, Camille, and for you to continue his vision. This is extremely important. Everything I do in the vines and in the qvevri, I ask: Will there be a child that will continue this art and way of life? Do my children see? Will they go on?”
I looked over to Mr. Reverse Osmosis to see if he was getting the message about carrying on a lineage, of having something to say, not something to sell. He was an emotional and feeling man even though we certainly spoke different languages. He understood pain.
The horn eventually landed with Ketevan, who stood up wearing a mischievous smile: “This is a horn, and I’ll drink it. But it is also wine, and that is truth,” she said. I wasn’t quite sure what she meant, but she spoke with so much authority that I didn’t doubt her for a second. Then it came to me.
I stood up and held the horn. I filled it with wine but not to its fullest, hoping no one would catch my subterfuge. And not knowing how to match the poetry around me, I became nervous. My fallback shy toast, “To Georgia,” wouldn’t do this time. I started, not even knowing what I would say until it came out of me: “I would like to drink to first times,” I said. “Looking around me, I see the faces of people here in this country for the first time. Whether falling in love for the first time or first tasting a stunning new fruit or the first time you see a Picasso or the first time you drink a naturally made wine, there is nothing like that shock of recognition, the flood of emotion, the electricity. This is no longer the first time for me in Georgia, but I cherish each time I am here, and I cherish, as well as you will, the first moments of arrival, the first bites of a radish or a cherry, the first time there’s singing at the table, the first time you drink from the horn, and the first time you recognize that, yes, this is Georgia.” I drained my horn, thinking, “For my brother.”
Touched by the night and the wine, Mr. Reverse Osmosis took out a guitar and started to sing about truth. The man had embraced the feelings around him. Georgia has that effect on people. I was still nervous. While the Georgian government is, to my knowledge, one of the first to fully support its natural winemakers, it is also prey to the many people who want to shape the wines to some ridiculous market ideal. This is the land of Ilia Chavchavadze, the sainted man who spearheaded the revival of the Georgian national movement in the second half of the nineteenth century and defended the honor of pure wines when he wrote, “Everything that is added into natural wine is fake. And the beverage mixed this way is not wine anymore but a fabricated drink. Let’s place only true wines on the market.”
I looked over at Mr. Reverse Osmosis and wondered: Is it the way of the world to steal virtue even while admiring it? This was something else Andrew and I had in common. Both whistleblowers, we feel compelled to protect virtue.
Mr. Reverse Osmosis did know pain; his wife had recently died. From his music I was sure he was a feeling man, yet that didn’t mean he wasn’t problematic. But I remembered the words of Lamara, and I saw that the Californian was the wolf to Georgia’s deer. People like him would only make the natural winemakers in this country sharper, more determined, and better winemakers on their own terms. Like with falling in love, one has to trust one’s instincts. My instinct was that in Georgia, where families live together (or at least weekend together), there is no feasting without drinking to those no longer with us; there is no feasting without remembering the country’s blood-soaked soil and remembering its history and truth. Its wine legacy will be strong enough to stand up to the outside world, which will put pressure on it to modernize and change. It reminded me of something a friend of mine had once told me as I was frantically looking for a misplaced object: what is yours can never really be lost.
Lamara’s Medicine
Lamara is a great cook, and though I’m not a fan of mchadi, hers, laced with smoked cheese, make them worth the calories. But more useful were her recipes for health. These came not from her grandmother but from years of studying ancient medical and herbal texts.
• For regularity: Purslane! Preserve it in salt, as you would the bladderwort or linden. Eat it over the winter.
• For sores: Yarrow tea or tincture, for any kind of lip or mouth sore. It cleans out the gall bladder, intestines, kidneys, gynecological parts. It is an immune system stimulator with antiseptic properties. The herb has phenomenal talent. There are thousands of uses for it.
• For vine health: Applying a tincture of walnut leaves on vines is even better than using nettles. Walnuts are very serious medicine.
• To cure obstructive sleep apnea: For a month, every time you wake, make a gagging motion fifty times, as if you’re about to heave. It is like physical therapy for the muscle that is needed to keep you snore-free.
• Pancreatic cancer: It is difficult to cure, but something that certainly won’t hurt is 1 teaspoon of sea buckthorn oil every morning.
• For liver function as well as metastasis of the liver: Boiled concentrated fresh grape juice.
• For irregularity: Green walnut jam made with copper sulfate.
• To cleanse the blood: Boil 20 liters of sweet grape juice down to 1/2 liter and drink.
• To cure a hangover: Sour yogurt soup. It’s full of calcium and is also a liver antiseptic.
• Garden-variety fever: Whey from yogurt is fantastic.
• For an upset stomach: One teaspoon chacha and salt.
• For coughs: Dry figs. Soak them in tea for a sore throat.
• For a great diuretic: Combine 3 fig leaves, 30 mulberry leaves, 30 lilac leaves, and 3 liters of water. Boil down to 1/2 liter. Take 100 grams twice a day.
• For sore throat or cancer of the throat and thyroid imbalance: Gather 7–9 linden branches, never from the side of the road. Crumble the leaves, not the stems, in your hand. Take 1 tablespoon of the leaves with 200 grams of boiling water for one evening’s dose. Drink 30 minutes before you eat. It is an important source of iodine.