Why were we all going to Meskheti if the region had no history of making wine? That is what I asked John, the feeling of futility creeping in. What exactly was the wisdom of spending two days of our limited time traveling to the southwestern section of Georgia if there was no current wine production, even less than in Ateni?
“I didn’t say that,” he corrected me. “There’s plenty of history. It’s drenched in history. But the problem is that in the past — and I’m talking centuries back — the area was continually invaded by the Muslims and torn up, particularly by the Turks. They would come in, yank out the vines, they’d leave, and the vines would go back in. The vine was the symbol of death and resurrection. Whether there’s any rebirth now, well, let’s see.”
Because I had grown to learn that John was usually right, I put my faith in him that every minute of this three-night venture would reveal itself to be worthy.
“Do you see them?” John asked, and I turned around to look for the Japanese women.
“Yup, they’re trailing us,” I said. We were about forty-five minutes from our first stop. Camille and Niki were conked out in the backseat. John and I kept bantering as we headed off to the region where they still felt the pain from the Turks’ ripping out and burning vines; it was felt as deeply as if it were ten years ago, not five hundred.
“Okay, I’ll stop complaining,” I said, and then I saw something else miraculous was going to occur: no food in our future until dinner. Except for the thick yogurt we’d had back in Signaghi, drizzled with John’s mother-in-law’s powerful rose petal jam, I was practically on a diet, a merciful respite from the usual Georgian death by food.
Riding in piggyback fashion we drove through the town of Borjomi. Niki woke up.
“I need cigarettes,” he said, putting his hand on John’s shoulder.
We pulled over in the rain as he ran out into the once-brilliant spa town that now looked like a Wild West gold-mining town gone to seed. The town’s commodity was not gold but water. It bottled Borjomi, Georgia’s most famous water (the country’s equivalent of the French Badoit) — salty, briny stuff, the water that created the salty-flavored sheep Stalin loved.
We rushed on to the first stop. A hard rain came down on us as we zipped past the hills, and I searched for evidence that wine had ever had significance here. There wasn’t a vine in sight. Taking a dirt road, we drove into what I was told was the tiny village of Adigeni.
The six of us walked toward a brick house with iron railings. Meskheti is a region rich in iron and thought to be the birthplace of metallurgy. But the main point of interest was the house’s front lawn with its low-hanging fruit from a pergola.
Emzar Gachichiladze, a boyish man in a vivid blue soccer shirt, came to greet us. He had created his own little experimental vineyard, fueled by a childhood obsession he shared with Kakha Aspinidze, who joined us as well. Those young men — grape hunters I called them — friends since they were little boys, roamed the region hunting wild vines, grafting them, and keeping them alive.
To prove his point, Emzar frenetically sliced off full bunches of several different grapevines for us to taste. As soon as we’d tasted from one, he’d enthusiastically stuff our hands with another offering of sweet grape berries. There was a nameless red one, juicy like Gamay. Some of them were familiar, like a spicy Aligoté that had come as a French foreigner to Georgia in the late 1800s. Most of the grapes had no names, culled from forsaken vines that had been hidden by the woods. One of them had an abalone-like mottled gray, iridescent hue. The flavors were so very vibrant — extreme fruit mixed with musk.
It was surprising that in Emzar’s eagerness for us to taste his projects he was able to leave any fruit at all on the vines. When the rain started to finally pound, Emzar suggested we go to see his brother, Zviad, who lived only two houses away. He turned the grapes we had just sampled into wine.
We walked into Zviad’s living room, where his brown-eyed daughter stared at us curiously. Who could blame her? We were a strange crowd and we were drenched: the Skinny Buddha, Niki; the blond, ringletted Camille; the Norse King, John; the pocket- and giant-sized Asian women, Keiko and Maika; and those grape hunters in soccer shirts. We found Emzar’s brother in the kitchen, a sticky mess in the middle of spinning the honey from his honeycombs. Zviad washed up, and then we proceeded to tasting.
The first wine was made from a blend of honeysuckle-ish Muscat and the more earthy Goruli Mtsvane. It had some trapped gas, giving it a little prickle. It was a little sloppy in winemaking but not bad. Not bad at all. The second wine was packed with flavor. I poked Camille, “Do you recognize it?” I asked. She nodded. It is so rare that a wine tastes exactly like the grape it came from, but this case was pure and direct, iridescent fruit to wine glass. The wines weren’t made in qvevri but in glass jars. The wines had so much to say and said it so well that I wrote down in my book that with a little help, a qvevri, and some mentorship, a star winemaker would be made. Zviad had talent. John noticed it too. “Did you ever think of bottling? he asked Zviad. We could use a wine from this region at Ghvino Underground.”
“That would be my dream,” Zviad replied with such feeling that I felt that for him it was the equivalent of my being told the novel I had had in my drawer for years was going to be published. This desire to bottle was brave because in that part of Georgia, rural and far away from commercial practices, the local bottled wine was inferior to homemade — just as in Soviet times, before the fall. Zviad wanted to be part of the future, where the bottle would be trusted.
Zviad did sell locally, even if not in bottles. With not enough grapes being grown in his area, he purchased grapes all the way from Kakheti and made the wine in his village in order to be able to sell to the village people for supras and weddings. “At weddings there are usually five hundred people. With 2–3 liters a person, it is a good business.”
After we had tasted his sweet propolis and knocked back some requisite chacha, Zviad changed his plans to join us that night for feasting at Kakha’s house, an hour away. He was thirsty for wine talk. But he’d have to wait.
The two grape hunters were now determined to show us every single one of their discoveries. With the light starting to turn blue, I was dubious we would get to any of them before nightfall, so in the early evening we took the slow route to dinner. Our caravan, now four cars long, pulled over to the side of the road not far from a village called Chacharaki. We crossed the road and tromped through nettles and briars, past apple and quince trees and the wild katsvi (sea buckthorn), to a vine that snaked up a very, very tall tree. “Two hundred and fifty years old,” Kakha said, very proud of himself. He struggled to reach some of the bunches, but then we tasted and looked in reverence. It was White Horse Breast, he said. It was a grape unknown to me.
“But there’s something even rarer. We’ll show you.”
Our caravan was off in search of one of the only vines left of Black Horse Breast, or, in Georgian, Tzkenis Zuzu. It was an ancient grape in an ancient place.
Horse Breast, whether white or black, hadn’t yet made it into any of Jancis Robinson’s scholarly books on grapes. It is virtually unresearchable except for by word of mouth. It was a fine eating grape, but the wine made from it? I had no idea. There was something mystical about looking at a grapevine that old but still bearing fruit.
Nichgori — the village with the cellars — was comprised of two boxy houses with the same local ornate ironwork dressing their facades. We parked on a broken road, jumped over a rustic stone wall, and started the walk up the path in the damp woods with the purpose of stalking the legendary Horse Breast. “And there’s something else, too,” John whispered to me and then ran ahead, giggling.
I tromped along with Niki and Camille, Keiko and Maika at the rear, their cameras emitting a constant buzzing, snapping sound. I could see that our leaders in the front knew the terrain as well as I knew the faulty steps of my lopsided apartment building — after all, they had played there as children. Just as I began to wonder whether it was worth turning an ankle on the uneven earth in the overgrown forest, there was a clearing. I could see a series of very large excavated holes in the ground. I walked over and peered down into them.
“Oh my God!” I yelled as soon as I grasped what was below me. I’d never seen anything like it. Keiko and Maika started to click away excitedly, mesmerized, because about ten feet down, with absolutely no fanfare or signage, in a rabbit warren of rooms, was a glimpse into a long-ago wine world: a twelfth-century stone crush pad. “Whoa,” I thought, “the stories you could tell.”
I stood above it, wondering when it had been abandoned or when it had thrived. It was history in the flesh, but its context had been lost. Surely it had been beaten, lost, and revived, but since the Ottoman invasion in the 1500s, it had been lost. Yet these people have nursed its memory for over five hundred years.
“It might as well be Pompeii,” I said. “Where are the World Heritage petitions?” I asked. “This needs to be preserved; it is a jewel.”
“I told you,” John said, chuckling, proud of himself. True, he had tried to tell me that there was something extraordinary to see in Meskheti other than a region that had been stripped by the Turks. But talk about an undersell job! I thought that on the way to see the Horse Breast his big treat would be a sideshow of more ancient buried qvevri, which are about as common in Georgia as espresso joints in Williamsburg. How could I have imagined his big surprise was an ancient community winery operation worthy of being shipped off whole to the British Museum? How was it that this overgrown wine operation had been shrouded in anonymity, the secret of childhood friends who romped in the woods? There were no tickets, no visitors, and only a few of the obsessed who seemed to know or care. The grape hunters stood there with their hands on their hips, grinning. I felt like whipping out my iPhone and calling my best editor to pitch the story, even as I knew there was danger in letting others know. Once a place like this gets headlines, accessibility brings overexposure, and the next thing you know there’s a McDonald’s where we had parked the cars.
There was no time to rest or do the site justice; we had spent too much time schmoozing earlier. I never would have allowed the idling had I known there were treasures to be found in the forest. As a result, I had to breeze by this amazing place in order to pursue the rare vine that had to be seen as well.
We had to move quickly, climb and scuttle before the darkening sky rendered our eyes useless. Walking along the ridge in the last moments of sunlight, I tried to imagine how vines and vineyards on terraces had thrived, how they had once covered the landscape. By the time the Soviets arrived in the 1920s, there wasn’t even a pip or a stem left for them to dispose of. The wine culture devastation of Meskheti was one that the Georgians could not blame on the Soviets.
The others — John, the other women, the grape hunters — had run ahead, but I had to slow down. I would never have forgiven myself if I didn’t take the time to breathe in the place — the setting sun, the rising moon; after all, when would I be back? Niki stayed with me, protectively. We stood in silence for a while; the landscape was confusing, almost desert-like. The hills in the distance had the remnants of terraces on land so foreboding, how could anything have ever grown on it? I bent down to tie my shoelace, but as I did, I took in both black basalt stones and degraded, oxidized, and rusty basalt-based soil. I love basalt for wines. There is something about the way basalt — trapped volcanic magma pressurized by eons under the earth — nurtures a vine and brings an almost bloody taste to reds, a fine ashen quality in the finish, and firm acidity to both. “But where was the volcano?” I asked.
Niki, in his Buddhist-like wisdom, lifted a finger up and pointed to the mountain range in front of us. As the crow flew, there stood a not-quite-dormant purple volcano. I hadn’t been wrong in thinking of that spot as the Pompeii of Georgia.
Piercing the falling dark and the raising song of the birds headed for sleep were shouts from below, including Keiko’s Chihuahua-like, high-pitched yip of a cry. It sounded urgent. Nervous someone had broken a leg — that would have been a pretty pickle — we sprinted to catch up, scaling down rocks, sliding down mud, battling brambles. When we finally reached them, we saw the commotion. Tangled behind the wild quince and apple was not someone’s leg but the last remaining Black Horse Breast vine known to man. God knows how ancient the variety was. Who knows? Perhaps it was the relative of the vine Noah had planted after the flood, a relative of the very first winemaking grape. It had snaked up a massive tree, as if racing from the Turks for its life. Kakha monkeyed up the trunk onto its limbs and shimmied down with bunches to offer us each a taste. The berries were long, shaped like slender cornelian cherries. We popped them into our mouths, the sweet, tangy flavors moistening our hunger for dinner as the jackals brought on the night.
On the dark and treacherous walk back we used phones for their flashlight function. We arrived safely and then were off to be further rewarded with dinner at Kakha’s house.
The old house sat hidden, camouflaged into the hill, as so many of the homes were, so the Turkish invaders couldn’t find them. We were shown into a closet-like room, long and narrow. Kakha’s mother’s Meskhetian cuisine was different from what I’d tasted in other parts of the country. In this region the dumplings, called kinkhali, were mini, almost like gnocchi, and served with garlic water. There was a hot pepper sauce similar to Sriracha and rustic bow-tie noodles doused with caramelized onions. There was bagel-like bread that immediately made me think of bagels or that Turkish bread, simit.
Niki and John, only in their late thirties, were the wine elders of the table to the young, enthusiastic men. Though not knowing where to start, the grape hunters were hungry for wine talk. I had feared that the only people eager to make wine traditionally, naturally, were the men and women who had lived through the country’s Communist era, who had had their dreams delayed until middle age. But I saw that the youth would, and could, carry on the tradition even if they had no idea there was a natural wine movement out in the rest of the world. They were just wanting to make ancestral and honest wine, more out of a sense of nationalistic expression, a heritage, than anything else. I pierced a dumpling and dunked it in the plum sauce, and as I heard them talk about folk knowledge in the context of vines, I got goose bumps.
“If you can’t get into a qvevri, you shouldn’t use it,” Kakha said, even though he had yet to use one.
Out came the chacha, fueling the talk. Niki and John agreed that the only way to clean a qvevri well was to have one big enough to jump inside. The ones that are as tiny as a vase are not only difficult to clean, but also their smallness causes other complications. Then came the more interesting stuff — the theme of what was at hand: the nobleness of the wild-growing vinifera grape. Once the vines were tamed and cultivated, it was a different story. The issue of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents came to me all over again.
Kakha regaled us with the virtues of wild vines like the ones we had seen — how they run up to the trees, have fewer diseases, and need no treatments. A common misconception, he said, is that they barely give fruit. False. In reality, as we had seen hours before, they produce plenty of grapes, and they seem to live forever. Emzar dove in to describe the ripening of all of the different kinds of grapes. He was encyclopedic. They had hopes. Bring back the vines. Replant. This was a winemaking center. Revival time! And these young ones also knew some tricks. For example, they knew that there was a particular wild apricot tree and a certain elm tree that, when grown near vines, gave them the protection of natural sulfur.
The talk of wild vines continued as long as it could, but as fascinated as we were about this kind of wild apricot and the mysteries of co-plantation, we grew tired. The journey to our next bed, just outside the medieval city of Vardzia, was an hour long. “The roads are tricky,” John said. So we had one last chacha and headed off.
John and I were so stimulated by the conversation that I knew he’d have an easy time staying alert. “John, did you know about the wild apricot tree?”
“And the elm,” he said. “Don’t forget the elm.”
“But did you know that they have a relationship with the vine and create a natural sulfur?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“It’s amazing,” piped up Camille, surprising us. We had thought she was asleep. She put her face in between the seats as she went on. “This country. There is magical natural sulfur. Gela has a problem with volatility in the wine, and he tells me to have faith, that it will all disappear. And there’s Niki here, leaving his grapes when he should be harvesting because he has faith it will all work out.”
“And what does it all mean to you?” I asked.
“That we in France have lost the instinct, and even if we’re looking to work naturally, we need lab reports to tell us about what we should just know intuitively.”
“Everyone else has lost the ancient knowledge. Others have to research and collect, but here it all still lives,” I said, looking out the window, daydreaming and overtaken by sadness. The moon was full, lighting up the mountains. It looked naked and tan, just like the moon from the moon walk pictures. And there was Saturn, like a huge streetlamp, so near and so clear, I felt I must have left Earth.
In the morning there was mist, and we were officially in Queen Tamar country.
Queen Tamar was the great-granddaughter of Davit the Builder, who was considered to be the greatest and most successful Georgian ruler in history, and Tamar wasn’t too far behind. Tamar was known for her beauty and gentleness, but to survive in Georgia at that time, constantly under threat in the twelfth century, one had to have a bionic backbone. It was this queen who had taken back her empire from the bloodthirsty Timor, who had ransacked the country. This queen, centuries later, was still the beloved heartbeat of Georgia.
One of the wildest descriptions of the adored queen I’d read came from a pop history website, badassoftheweek.com:
When King Giorgi III surprisingly crowned his 18-year-old daughter as the co-ruler of the Kingdom of Georgia in 1178 AD, he is said to have uttered a quote that is still famous in the country today. I’m paraphrasing, and I haven’t been great about keeping up with my Medieval Georgian language skills, but it more or less said something along the lines of this: “It doesn’t matter whether a lion is a male or a female — it will still use its horrific terrifying claws to murderliciously mutilate your pathetic face in front of your entire family, rip your esophagus from your bloody corpse with a face full of slavering curved fangs, and then fucking 360-degree behind-the-back tomahawk jam your disemboweled spleen into your own asshole.”
This is the tale of Queen Tamar of Georgia.
While the author was having a lot of fun with this one — and I cannot find his original context except out of the medieval fantasy comic books — it does illustrate the kind of valiance, power, and steely courage needed to rule at that time, and Queen Tamar had it.
Tamar lived in one of the most spectacular cave cities on earth. As it was the Pompeii of the wine world, Vardzia was accessible, though it costs a fee to get in. It was still early enough and it wasn’t overrun by tourists, so we set out up the path. In front of me were three schoolgirls singing a polyphonic tune I didn’t recognize. I’d seen cave cities in Italy, but Vardzia was a crazy city, Queen Tamar’s home, a metropolis carved into stone over thirteen stories high. It took more than fifty years to complete and it housed a city of over fifty thousand people. “This is really where Shota Rustaveli wrote The Knight in the Panther’s Skin?”
“Yes,” said Niki. “He was in love with Tamar.”
One of the reasons Niki placed his harvest in jeopardy was to be able to come to this place, to soak in its history, to see it again. It is believed that Rustaveli’s poem was a not so thinly romantic love poem to his queen and romance, indeed, ran through Vardzia. There too, knit into the cave’s mysteries, were ancient qvevri remains. It was a living relic, and there was no docent telling me I couldn’t touch the walls.
On the way down, another young man waited for us at the base of the city. Giorgi Natemadze had some packages to deliver to his uncle, who lived nearby.
We followed him on impossibly narrow white lanes of raw, jagged, hard limestone. Those boulder-filled roads were for a horse, not for low-hanging gas tanks. It seemed like an awfully dangerous trek just to go and visit his uncle. Miraculously we arrived with all parts intact at the tiniest of villages, peaceful and tucked away from our century; it seemed straight out of a painting on some nobleman’s wall of a time long ago. Even its name was out of some fairytale: Chachkari, or gates to the distillery.
This kind of village was beyond my experience. It was hidden behind a ridiculously perilous path, and the homes were further hidden, buried into the rocks, hobbit houses hiding from the marauders. We parked and walked through a forest like one out of middle earth, rich and lush, where two young boys were picking and throwing apples at each other. We forged the creek, climbed up its lush banks past the deep crimson of the cornelian cherry, and with the gurgling of water below and the beginning of rain above, Giorgi pointed and said in a hushed voice, “There.”
This was not the black, but the White Horse Breast vine. Four hundred years old, it was as thick as a redwood’s trunk. The Horse Breast, like the other native Georgian varieties, were noble wine grapes, those referred to as “vitis vinifera.” But here was another example of vinifera reverting back to its natural state. Its grapes had grown loose and long; it had reverted to its wild past with a sense of holiness and grace. “Ketevan told me when she was at university that this vine was known of,” said John of his wife. “It is a legend. Students would make pilgrimages to see it.”
That’s when I realized that this was the vine Givi, Stalin’s last winemaker, had told me about. Pilgrims of the vine came here to seek its wisdom as a vine who had seen it all: pain, suffering, joy. I’ve always had so much reverence for our elders — the wise ones, the ones who had stories and had learned from them; those who kept the knowledge of elm and apricot trees; those, like Lamara, who held the wisdom of those who had come before her. There in front of me was the vine that had escaped to the woods and safely hidden from the Turks and the Soviets; the vine was a survivor.
“In this vine,” Giorgi said, touching the huge trunk as if petting his dog, “is the story of my family.” His passion came from his father, who was dreaming of popularizing Meskheti grapes and bottling the wine. “He would take me to the forest, to the vine, and tell me the role it played in our family,” he said. “Honestly, I didn’t feel the wine until I made my first. Now it’s a passion.”
Giorgi struggled to catch some bunches of fruit for us. He brought them down, and if the berries looked wild, they tasted regal. “I can harvest 250 kilos of grapes a year from this vine.” He said the vine grew so tall, he couldn’t ever pick them all; in fact, he had to rappel to harvest.
It started to rain once more, and we ran through the woods to Giorgi’s uncle’s place. We slid through the mud to a tiny cottage. Keiko, who had been relatively silent so far, screamed in the excitement of recognition when she saw the man and it registered that this was not the first time she had been there. The man was sporting a woodcutter’s cap, grinning somewhat toothlessly. Keiko clutched his arm, and they led us to his little one-room dwelling; it was a dirt-floor hut smaller even than my tiny apartment’s kitchen. He started to tell us some of his story. He had not lived all his life in the village; he had earned a doctorate in economics and taught in Tbilisi. But when he retired, he chose to return to this remote place and take on a monk-like existence, a path that doesn’t seem unusual for people in the country. It was his past, his memory, his soul. As Giorgi said, the story of the vine was the story of his family. He needed nothing more than what he had in that Spartan tableau.
Niki said to me, “I understand this. When I build my wine cellar in Manavi, I will leave Tbilisi and live like this.”
Giorgi prepared cucumbers, tomatoes, bread, and cheese and brought out the 2009 wine, a grape blend. The cork was so jammed in that no one could get it out. Then, as cool as a Williamsburg barista, Niki effortlessly opened the bottle. No wonder he wasn’t worried about his own harvest.
Finally we got to taste a wine made with the ancient vine, the blend of Meskheti Saperavi and the White Horse Breast. It was perched on the edge of volatility, but it stayed there without going over: pure and with a touch of raspberry ink.
Giorgi’s family was the first in the region to bottle, making it safe for the others. They had stayed natural from the beginning, but they would need to be resolute to stay that way. Someone from the Ministry of Agriculture was guiding them through the winemaking process. Giorgi said, “He said, Why make an organic wine if you can do better than that? He tried to get me to buy chemicals. He said to me, ‘If you don’t buy them, I won’t give you advice.’ Then I said, ‘I won’t take your advice.’ Done.” Not all the wolves were foreign.
There I was in The Knight in the Panther’s Skin territory. The same unconditional love in the poem was also applied to wine. It took centuries for the vine to come back there, but return it did. If I had had doubts that the youth were not part of the journey, I was mistaken. If I had had doubts that there would not be a backbone to resist the consultants, I was wrong.
Rose Petal Jam
The beginning of the journey west started with yogurt and John’s mother-in-law’s gorgeous jam. This is a heart-stopping jam of beauty. Over breakfast I asked her for her recipe, but it will be hard to replicate unless you have access to unsprayed roses with a strong fragrance; what they use in Georgia is very much a wild rose or a Damascus rose. Remember, petals without much scent will give you a bland, tasteless jam. Try to get them just before they open. Stir into yogurt or puddings. This is crazy delicious laced into morning yogurt.
1 pound fresh red, strongly scented rose petals
4 pounds sugar
9 cups water
Put the petals in a large bowl. Add 1 cup sugar and rub into the petals until they are thoroughly bruised. Cover with plastic wrap and set aside for several hours or overnight.
Prepare syrup by combining water and the remaining sugar in a large pot. Bring to a boil, and cook over medium heat for about 30 minutes, stirring often. Stir the bruised rose petals and sugar mixture into the pot of syrup. Simmer for 30 minutes more. Stir frequently, pressing against the petals now and then to extract as much flavor as possible.
Continue cooking for about 10 minutes or until jam is thick and syrupy. You can test for readiness by spooning a bit of hot jam onto a cold saucer. It should set. If it doesn’t, continue cooking.
Pour the jam into prepared jars.