“The grapes don’t wait,” Ramaz called out from his alfresco Imereti-style crush pad. Behind his parents’ old home, he was working in a whir. I could see a mess of cobalt blue plastic bins, the kind olives or pickles might live in; winemaking tools; gourds affixed to long poles; a triton pitchfork fashioned out of a tree branch; and a wooden trough where grapes for his skin-contact wine could be gently crushed.
Our group inched toward him, walking carefully in the mud. Along the way, a Chagall-like mooing cow was roped to a tree, and the babbling auburn chickens seemed unfazed. We were, though. The mix of limestone with heavy clay had become ridiculously slick under the rain, transforming the earth that had been so black at the solstice into a skating rink of mud. I doubted we’d make it to his winery without a messy flop in the muck. What a vintage, I thought; perfect for Noah’s Ark.
When we did reach Ramaz, he was too sticky to hug. Keiko and Maika started to photograph the scene madly. They tried to capture his frenzy as he crushed grapes in a petite wooden vertical press that was bleeding juice from its slats, reminding me of a leaky boat. He worked so swiftly, it was as if he was bailing out a boat instead of flowing the juice into the buried qvevri. This winery was protected from the elements only by a lean-to shelter, as is typical in that part of the country. Ramaz is a pro, used to working under duress. His wine is always impeccably clean, even though he is adamant against the use of sulfite additives, even in a washed-out vintage like this one. When harvested in the rain, grapes are more prone to rot, even if meticulously selected, prompting most winemakers to use the antibacterial additives.
“Alice,” he said, “take this. Fresh Tsistka.”
I took the cup of nubile juice from him. He took his pipe from his shorts and lit up. The pipe tobacco weaved into the sweet smell of pressed fruit, blending savory and sweet. Looking around me, I asked, “How did outdoor wineries become the tradition in Imereti?” The eastern part of the country almost always has sheltered wineries, but Imereti, more noted for its wet climate, is also known for open-air winemaking. Before he answered the question, Ramaz told a story.
The Bolsheviks claimed Ramaz’s paternal grandfather’s forty acres of vineyards in the early 1920s. Ramaz started his winery in 2007 on the tiny bit of land that had been left for the family. He did not bottle his wine, however, until 2010. But he first made wine as a sixteen-year-old boy, the same year his grandfather turned him on to another very important ritual for country living.
Probably some time after it became obvious that I didn’t eat meat, Ramaz said to me, “And now I’m going to tell you about killing animals. Here there is a tradition for all the families in the village to kill a pig at Christmastime. Some men can kill a pig; some can’t. If they can’t, they must ask someone to do this job for them. My father could kill a chicken but not a pig, so we asked someone to do this for him every Christmas. One time, when I was sixteen, the man who came to kill our pig got pretty drunk at a neighbor’s house and did not come to our house. I decided to kill the pig myself because I understood that men must do everything in my father’s house. So I asked my grandfather, my mother’s father, to help me. He lived sixty kilometers away, in the mountains of Lechkhumi. I was his first grandchild, and we had a very close and warm relationship. He liked my idea about the pig and said to me, ‘Now you will become a man.’ So we drank two glasses of chacha, and I killed my first pig with a knife. Then he taught me how to salt it.”
With that vivid story as the colorful preamble, I nudged Ramaz. “So, why are the wineries alfresco in Imereti?”
“I’m always asking my father that. He thinks wine has to feel the rain,” he said, looking touched by the rain himself. “I’m not sure about it though.” He went on to tell me that once his production started to grow, he’d have the convenience of a real winery with water access and a mud-free environment. Tradition is one thing, but to make wine on a somewhat larger scale, even if a mere two thousand cases, Ramaz wanted something a little less rustic.
With the light fading, Ramaz would have to stop his work for the day and destickify and dry off. Selfishly I was glad; we were all — our little traveling posse — tired from the long wet day, eager to talk and drink among ourselves, and I was impatient to get to Wi-Fi so I could check in on my brother. But first we had to help John in carrying in the baskets of delectable bounty from his car.
On the way from rain-soaked Meskheti we had taken a slight detour from the main road. I was texting with Andrew and knew the time had come to get back to the States as soon as possible when John called out, “There they are!” He swerved over to the side. I followed him out to the foragers in their roadside stands. Caesar mushrooms were waiting for us in baskets filled to the brim. Though relatives of the poisonous (and hallucinogenic) Amanita muscaria, these gorgeously brilliant burnt orange fungi are John’s obsession, and he showed no restraint. After bargaining over the price, he bought about three kilos; “Nestan will cook them up for us,” he said as we loaded the treasure into the car.
We presented the mushrooms to Ramaz’s wife, Nestan, and she cooed over them like one would over a newborn, whisking them off to the kitchen. Caked in mud, we left our collection of sneakers by the door so that they could be hosed off, while Niki stayed outside in the rain and took a quiet moment with a cigarette.
Waiting for Ramaz and for the evening to commence, we retired to the living room of Ramaz’s parents’ home. The room was a hodgepodge of leftovers from another time — Soviet-era radios and mismatched wallpaper, among other things. It reminded me of a hefty older market woman wearing plaids and stripes. Finally, as dark fell, Ramaz set his shoes by the door. He explained that he had come in from Tbilisi just for the weekend to look in on his grapes, never expecting to have to spring so quickly into action. But the sugars had spiked. They were already too high for his comfort zone. “What could I do?” he said, approaching us as Maika, Keiko, and Camille looked over some photos on an iPad. “The fruit was ready. My cousins were here. Everyone had to stop and pick in the rain, immediately.”
I looked over at Niki. Was he nervous playing with us in the west when perhaps his own grapes were ready? No, he was happy, calm. He was where he wanted to be, so I thought it best to stop micromanaging.
Then Ramaz started on the difficult task: deciding what we were going to drink and assembling the bottles in a long line on the table. There were eight of us; he had arranged about ten bottles. The Georgians rarely taste. We were in for it.
Apparently noticing Niki for the first time, Ramaz asked him, almost harshly, “Don’t you have to harvest?”
“Not yet,” Niki said.
“And you still don’t have the qvevris in the ground?”
Niki shrugged.
“You’re crazy for waiting so long.”
“Don’t worry, Ramaz; the only thing that matters is the result.”
“But, is your winery ready?” Ramaz asked in disbelief.
Niki shook his head, and Ramaz, questioning his cool dismissal, asked incredulously, “Then what are you doing here?”
“It’s obvious,” Niki said, with his sly smile. “I miss your wine, and you don’t let me drink it unless I come here. So I came.”
On cue, Ramaz grabbed his Tsistka — not the fresh juice but the wine he makes with no skin contact. The result has a lemony and angular spunk, and he started to pour it into our glasses. In just a short while he uncorked the Tsolikouri, amber colored and satisfying.
People have always put the wines of the east and west of the country in very separate categories, and not just because there is an indoor winery tradition on one side and an open-air tradition on the other. Kakheti on the east side is known for long skin contact and amber-colored strong whites. In Imereti and the west it is traditional not to make skin contact. But in reality there have been wines with skin contact in Imereti as well. There is simply not as much dogma as assumed. Ramaz makes both kinds, but his heart is more in synchrony with the skin contact, and I swear he acts disappointed if I ask for the Tsistka instead of his amber wine.
We toasted, then made more fun of Niki and his faith in the grapes. Maika was not drinking wine but was totally fixated on drinking the fresh grape juice. The bottle of Tsistka was followed by one with a strikingly amusing label; it had an illustration of an old man, Ramaz’s uncle; his beautifully craggy face, framed by heavy black glasses and a checkerboard smile, beamed from the label, along with the words I am Didimi from Dimi and this is my Krakhuna.
Finally the food arrived, little by little, starting with the plate of raw herbs for munching and the lobiani bread. Once the mushrooms came out, we started in on a discussion of the elephant in the room: the lifted ban on Georgian (and Moldovan) wine importation to Russia. It set the Georgian wine scene in anxiety mode.
In 2006 the Russians had placed a ban on two of Georgia’s best imports, water and wine. The Georgians mostly believe this to have been a trumped-up charge but, according to a Reuters report, “Around the time that the water and wine bans were imposed in 2006, a Russian tabloid printed full-page ads advising Russians to stay away from Georgian wine and food — a pointed play on Soviet anti-Nazi propaganda in World War II.” Few believed the reason given by the chief sanitary inspector of Russia, Gennadiy Onishchenko, who claimed that among the problems with Georgian wines was the presence of heavy metals and pesticides, as well as wines with falsified alcohol. This accusation was aimed to hurt, as according to a paper written by Kym Anderson of the University of Adelaide, in 2005 wine represented about one-tenth of Georgia’s exports, making it “around six times more economically important to Georgia than wine exports [were] for France, Italy and Spain.” Much of the exported wine went to Russia.
But it’s hard to piece together the truth about the ban. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reported a slightly different scenario in a July 2006 article:
“Nine out of ten of so-called Georgian wines on the international market are counterfeits. Many other countries are using well-known Georgian appellations to sell wines that are in fact not of Georgian origin,” says Emmanuel Hidier of FAO’s Investment Centre. “So protecting the country’s appellations is an important issue.”
Fakes ranged from alcoholic cocktails mixing spirits, colouring and flavours to wines bearing false appellations of origin. The small vineyard areas of some of Georgia’s most popular appellations mean supply often falls short of demand, a scenario ripe for counterfeiters.
What might jump out at the wine expert here is the reference to wine appellations. Georgia has one of the oldest laws for wine production with a system that was developed in the nineteenth century. Specific geographical areas and wine styles were mandated in the appellation laws. Some of the most popular were Tibaani, the location of Pheasant’s Tears, in the eastern part of the Alzani Valley. The soils were clay, loam, and limestone. Tibaani could be 100 percent Rkatsiteli but could have a small dilution of Mtsvane, and according to the register of the Georgian Intellectual Property Center, it would be “characterized with a dark amber colour, with species-specific aroma, extractability, velvet taste, and raisin tones.” Other famed wines were Tsinandali, Napareuli (Saperavi), and Khvanchakara (Aleksandrouli and Mujuretuli). Under the Soviets these wines, instead of being given appellations, were simplified and given numbers, so, for example, No. 8 was Kakhetian and No. 35, Tsinandali. When the ban went into effect, the appellation system of Georgia was still commonplace on the bottle. One reason that they are less common today is that appellations are optional, and as they are more and more meaningless to the consumer, they are more meaningless to the producer.
The Russian government had meant to crush Georgia, but instead the embargo has been a blessing. The results have been dramatic. There was a drop in the sale of Georgian wines from $81.4 million in 2005 to $29.2 million in 2007. But the gain was huge. The ban freed the Georgian wine industry to go back to its roots and find other markets.
With the ban in place, the new voices committed to organic farming and natural winemaking thrived. Before the embargo was lifted in 2013, exports had almost gotten back to the high of 2005, but the big plus was that the markets were more diversified. Anderson also noted that when the embargo started, the average export price for conventional wines was only $2 a liter, but it had almost doubled, to $3.60, by 2012. John, however, observed that natural wines were selling between $7.50 and $15 ex-cellar per bottle, fully on par with their French counterparts.
There was ambivalence about selling to Russia once more. There were tensions. I was at a dinner after a large Georgian wine tasting just that past spring. It was a huge supra, and the room was full of feasting international journalists. In the middle of it a posse of Russian sommeliers walked in, and the room instantly chilled. They stood in the doorway; no one knew they were coming, and there were no places set for them. The Russians were not pleased and were rather loud about their displeasure. When they were guided to the outdoor seating on the porch, they loudly rebuffed the offer, saying it was far too cold. So, eager to avoid confrontation, the singers and dancers who had been performing had to move out of the room to make way for the new guests. The sommeliers then sat down and started to demand chacha rather than wine. It was difficult to take them seriously. If they were sommeliers there to learn about the new Georgian wines, then why would they drink chacha during the meal? One sommelier, with his shaved head, T-shirt, and suit jacket, reminded me of the ruthless character Ben Kingsley plays in Sexy Beast. As I was deeply enjoying an Okro Rkatsiteli, I kept on looking back to see if he was going to pull out a gun. After dinner there were fistfights. “That’s what the Georgians are up against,” I had thought to myself.
A few months after the market in Russia reopened, Georgians had to maneuver the tricky waters and make nice with a country that — as recently as 2008 — had stormed its boundaries. “Russia remains the main market; Russians know Georgian wines and hopefully remember them,” said Levan Davitashvili, head of the National Wine Agency, at the time. He estimated that Georgia could export 10 million bottles of wine to Russia every year. (In the first half of 2015 Georgia sold 6.5 million bottles, down from 2014, due to the unstable political situation with Ukraine.) There are many large factories that have massive amounts of wine to sell, and Russia has a nostalgic market. It’s great for Georgia to have that outlet, but even if Russia is chimerical, it’s risky.
Pheasant’s Tears has about 6,000 cases to sell annually. That is a boutique figure by all standards but more than a mere thimbleful. In an interview with Voice of America, John had said if it were up to him, he’d keep the embargo to give room for the small producer to thrive. “The danger of the Russian market’s reopening is it will be an invitation to people who just want huge amounts of lesser-quality wine,” John warned. He was wary of the possibility that Georgia’s reputation would be sullied, as if it couldn’t also make wines of quality. In the end, some fine wine shops in Russia reached out to him. “They were sincere,” John said, so he made plans to deal with Russia.
But what about most of the natural guys who made too little wine and already had an international waiting list? “Never to Russia,” Ramaz said.
Because of the immediate popularity of the new independent wines, there were other problems. “They’re coming around looking for Krakhuna,” Ramaz said in his deep voice. “The factories. They are looking for the grapes. A big wine factory came to Didimi to offer a lot of money. A lot. Didimi, seventy-something years old, told them to go fuck themselves. This is very bad,” said Ramaz.
As the head of Georgian Slow Foods, Ramaz felt like the watchdog of the organic vinelands, and he sensed danger when he heard about the search for Krakhuna. Lighthearted Krakhuna had generated a fan club for its almost Muscadet liveliness. Ramaz said, “We fear that the growing need for grapes, and not just Krakhuna, will make it less appealing for people to work organically. Why should they when they could sell conventional grapes, or even inferior wine, for a lot of money to Russia?” There is still a lot of poverty in the country, and Ramaz feared that greed for easy money would pollute the desire to make quality, pure wine. Then he lowered his voice, as if the walls had the ears they had had under Soviet rule. “There is news that for the first time, containers of grape concentrate are coming in from outside of Georgia.”
Making wine from concentrate is illegal in Georgia, and the additive reminds Georgians of the bad wine manufactured under Soviet rule, something from which the new Georgia wants very much to distance itself. But there are still many people in the country with that Old World mind-set: Need more wine? Just add water and concentrate, whatever it takes. They make wine for money, not like these men and women who make it for love.
Georgia has a long history with idealism and wine, going back to the 1800s. The man considered the father of modern Georgia, Ilia Chavchavadze, made wine. He was committed to the idea of naturalness, even as foreign techniques, like the wine barrel and sugar, increased in popularity. He noted: “Our people disdain very much the addition of anything but grape juice into the wine. If now and then someone, somewhere, has dared to do it, he would try hard to hide it because all of us consider it a shame and a sin to profane the sacred juice of grapes that nature has given us with additions and interferences.” He was almost prescient when he wrote about preserving the good name of Georgian wine: “If it is a wish for our wine to claim its place on the Russian market and to suppress European false wines and have the way cleared [for our wine], this can only be achieved if we stand up to the European fake wines by having [people] taste our true wine.”
The twelfth bottle arrived at the twelfth hour, and I could tell that if I didn’t leave immediately, the roosters would be crowing and I’d have missed my window to change my plane ticket. So I left with Keiko and Maika to the strange hotel on the main road. As we approached it seemed lit up like a lantern, wrapped in crimson cellophane. Having rebooked my ticket, I slept fitfully until we left the next morning.
Our plan was to make it to Batumi while the sun was strong, so we rendezvoused with sleep-deprived John, Camille, and Niki. I was correct: more bottles had been opened after we left. They looked pretty ragged. A quick coffee and Niki was saying his good-byes. “It’s time,” he said about going back. “I need to make wine.”
We tried to persuade him to stay. His presence is always so comforting, even though his going was the best for him. He knew that, and we left him on the side of the road to catch one of those cheap taxis, called marshrutkas, that connect all of Georgia back to Tbilisi. In three hours he’d be digging holes in his land and sinking his qvevri.
Shortly after Niki left us, we passed a sign for the town of Navenavekvi. “Does that have a meaning?” I asked John.
“The place that vines used to grow,” he said.
These names are haunting, like the one that means “gates to the distillery” (Chachkari), but there are no more distilleries. Or this one, Navenavekvi, “where the vines used to grow.” “The village has a terroir of that red clay over limestone, like Burgundy,” John said. “It was abandoned by the Soviets. Ramaz thinks this will be a spot he can plant vines and expand, and in spite of its glorious name, because the mind-set here is still volume over quality, he will be able to buy the land more cheaply.”
“One day perhaps they’ll change it a little to the place where the vines do grow,” I said wistfully. Perhaps with growing markets the land will be reclaimed for their noble purpose.
Caesar Mushrooms Cooked in a Clay Dish
While this recipe is not super exciting on the page, the simplicity of the mushroom and the resulting crispness make it remarkable on the palate. You’ll need a terra-cotta pan. A Georgian one is nice, but you can find them in most cooking shops, perhaps from Spain. The Caesar is so delicate that the more simply you cook it, the more you can feel the texture and delicacy of the mushroom.
Remember that mushrooms cook down a great deal, so figure a pound to serve three people.
Heat the terra-cotta pan in advance, but heat it up slowly to avoid cracking. If you have a yard, heating it on the grill over coals is best, but an oven will work.
Clean the mushrooms with a brush, and if they are very large, cut in half lengthwise. The bigger the chunks, the juicier they remain. Once the pan is hot, add the mushrooms and a touch of salt and black pepper, and drizzle a touch of olive oil or butter. Let them sit in there for exactly 5 minutes. The idea is to just barely sear them to awaken the flavor. Caesar mushrooms cannot be eaten raw, so remember there’s a danger in undercooking, yet overcooking breaks their structure down too much.