John took off Neil Young and plugged in his wife’s singing group on the CD player. In a few minutes the car was filled with the sounds of krimanchuli. The word itself means “twisted iron,” and for sure it is the singing technique of the mountains — most notably Guria. It can hurt the ears at first and then becomes chantingly addictive. It sounds as if one song is played at two or three different speeds. The vocalizations sounded like jackals yodeling from one to another on mountaintops. We climbed higher, the songs got louder, and the landscape felt at once beachy and mountainous. Paradox was everywhere.
Thanks to the dubious wisdom of the five-year plans, Guria, with its semi-subtropical climate, became the zone for limes, the pekhva (a relative to the guava), and dark black tea. Even though inland the region can have killing frosts, there once had been many vines in the very village to which we were going, Dablatsikhe. When we got out of our car, Keiko was already running.
“Mevludi!” she excitedly yelled out as she ran over to a rakish older fellow with a weathered face who was standing on the porch of the winery we were approaching. Having photographed the winemakers throughout Georgia, wearing their “Georgia in My Mouth” T-shirts, Keiko and Maika knew everyone I was meeting for the first time. When the petite woman reached the man, she threw her arms around him and hugged him so fiercely that I was a little embarrassed. I didn’t have to worry; the man, an agronomist from the village who had had a big hand in helping to establish the Iberieli Wine Cellar, was not fazed. “The women in this village have a hard time with me. But Japanese women? They love me,” he said with a shrug that seemed to say, “Go figure.”
Mevludi was not the owner of the winery. That honor belonged to a businessman named Zurab Topuridze. But as Zurab had had to take his son to Germany for a medical treatment, in his absence Mevludi, adviser and keeper of the local wisdom, would entertain us.
Chain-smoking along the way, Mevludi led us to the vines; here, too, like at Pheasant’s Tears and in Meskheti, there was a library collection of grapes. But when we sat down in the room, at a rickety fold-out table in the living room, the afternoon took off. The women of the house, presumably Zurab’s employees, more remarkable cooks, started to feed us while Mevludi opened up bottles. This was easy as there were only three kinds: red, white, and rosé, all made from one grape varietal, the Chkhaveri.
Mevludi started to tell us his boss Zurab’s story. It was a familiar one. Seeing his father make wine, Zurab longed to produce wine himself. As soon as he had the money, he purchased land and planted vines for production, as well as for experimentation and to revive the areas that had almost lost grapes. But his focus, one on which he had bankrolled everything, was the grape his grandfather loved, the Chkhaveri.
“There used to be fifty-five kinds of red grapes here in this little village,” Mevludi said as he poured the rosé. From destemmed fruit it was made almost like a red wine with one full week of skin contact. It was particularly lively, flower flecked, strong yet gentle. Once more I recalled that putrid rosé at the cooking school. Now this wine from Zurab’s was a wine to show off to the school’s clients and friends, I thought. But there’s so little of it even in Georgia. Japan, a country obsessed with simplicity and natural wine, got its orders in for the wine first. A perfectionist Japanese importer, Mrs. Yasuko Goda, is somewhat of a modern legend, known for her ladylike demeanor, white gloves, and fear that the use of a barcode on a bottle will harm the wine inside. With the wines prepared according to her desire, Mrs. Goda took the world’s treasure trove of Zurab’s wines for her country, one of the most fanatic consumers of naturally made Georgian wines.
For each new wine, even though we were drinking out of rustic glasses, Mevludi made us rinse them so that we could purely taste the new wine, an affectation that is rarely needed unless one is progressing back from dry to sweet wines.
Chain-smoking and eloquent, the weathered agronomist with the wise, worn face of a philosopher blew his cigarette smoke away from the lunch table as he said; “You can make wine only if you love it, not if what you love is the money.”
Keiko, who had been in the middle of dissecting the boiled trout on her plate, stopped and then in appreciation yipped once more the man’s name, “Mevludi!” Then she threw her enthusiastic arms once more around the older gentleman. She was as happy as a kid who had just been pushed on a swing. Here was a man who worked with wine out of a passion that defied money, a man with strong values, and she was deeply touched, as was I. So many small producers had been motivated by the need and desire to keep tradition alive, not by money.
Mevludi reminisced: “My grandfather, great-grandfather, everyone was involved in the vines. But now, I’m the last person of my generation still involved. The last.”
Guria, linked with the region of Samegrelo, is often thought to be the region with the oldest winemaking culture in Georgia. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was positively thriving. Now it was limping. Somewhere near seventy, Mevludi had the same concerns as I had: would Georgia be able to survive? Would there be enough of the new generation to carry on, motivated by what had motivated Georgia through the years, a deep connection to the vine?
“What can be done so that you aren’t the last?” I asked. “Is anyone interested now that Zurab has made such a success?”
As village elder, Mevludi took his role as mentor seriously. “We’re hiring young boys in the village, hoping they’ll love it too. Vines are not potatoes; it is not chucking seeds in the ground and harvesting the next year,” he said, referring to the nobility of the grapevine. He was determined. And it wasn’t idle talk. He would do what he could to help the youth develop a love for wine and carry on the tradition. “Vine work is manual labor. The type of person attracted to the vine is not someone attracted to quick money. The trouble now is that there’s still so much poverty, so we hire between five and ten people and try to pay them a little more than other places would. Here’s the plan: pay fair wages, instill an interest in the hopes the worker becomes passionate.”
“One can hope,” I said, thinking about Iago’s experience: kids more interested in playing checkers and drinking coffee than earning money to clean his qvevri. I tend to be pessimistic, but perhaps there was hope.
Mevludi, with his empty plate, seemed to subsist on smoke and reminiscence. “In Soviet times, everything was quantity-driven. No one was looking at quality or natural production, just how you could have more, more, and more.”
It was then that everything crystallized for me: communism under the Russians and modern-day capitalism were twins separated at birth. Neither fostered or celebrated the individual. The large factory was favored over the quality-oriented artisan. Modern economy meant outsourcing offshore for cheaper labor. Even the Georgians went sniffing in the wrong places and taking the wrong advice, like, for instance, from the British wine adviser they had hired who had always been outspoken against natural wine and in favor of “consistency,” as if wine were something straight off the conveyor belt.
Just as when I had discovered the Pompeii of wine, as well as Archil’s paradise of biodiversity, this revelation raised goose bumps. Sitting there in that living room, with the best tomatoes I’d had to date (and the bar for tomatoes in Georgia is very high), with Zurab’s lively wine in my glass and a spectacular plum sauce called tkemali on my plate (so garlicky that I knew it would kill not only a vampire, but also my palate), I knew why Keiko and Maika had come back repeatedly, often without an interpreter even though they spoke no Georgian. I understood why a shipment of qvevri was sitting in customs in Paris waiting to be planted at top wineries in the Loire and Beaujolais. I knew why I couldn’t get Georgia off my mind.
Georgia is still a country where possibility is extant. The country, with all of its quirks, had come to me at the moment I’d wondered if I was bored, jaded with wine. As a friend had said after my two books, The Battle for Wine and Love and Naked Wine, were published, perhaps my work was done. I’d sounded the alarm about wine falsification more loudly than anyone else at the time, and the wine world was a changed place because of it. I had earned my obituary. An old leftie who had been too young at the time of the hippies but who’s heart was into whistle-blowing and activism, I wondered what my next cause would be.
That was another quality my brother and I had in common. Even at the hospital when he was head of a cath lab, he was willing to risk lawsuits by outing a colleague who was falsifying papers. He would not suffer through the dishonest or irresponsible, even if it reflected poorly on him as the squealer. Saving lives and honesty mattered the most. He had become a doctor out of passion for medicine, not for the dollar. Perhaps the reason I so dearly wanted him to experience Georgia was to show him how our worlds connected in adulthood and how that spirit of idealism still thrived in the country by the Black Sea.
When Georgia appeared to me, I saw a subset of winemakers who had the power to drive a whole country to greatness. The fire had been lit under the wines made naturally, the thirst for them was unquenchable, and there weren’t enough great wines to satisfy the demand. And here, hiding in plain sight, were these winemakers in Georgia who didn’t have to revert to the way of their grandfathers; they had made wine in the manner of their ancestors all along. There were consultants trying to push them into consistency and reduce the supposed flaws, all in the good name of helping them make a living — but at the sacrifice of their history. I heard none of the nonsense espoused by growers in Europe or in California, who said, “I’m organic — except for Roundup.” Roundup is the brand name for the notorious and controversial weed killer glycophosphate.
But these Georgian farmers knew the reality; once chemicals like glycophosphate were involved, you had no right to use the word “organic” to describe your land.
These were men and women who had so much to tell the world, and all they needed was a platform. I was energized. This was something I could do. I couldn’t change the world, I couldn’t stop ISIS or promote world peace, but I could write about this tiny, rare wine culture.
Yet I’m not one for hero worship. I’m forever finding my own clay feet as a way to protect myself against profound disappointment. Georgia still has some remnants of the Soviet Union; there is politicizing and favors; there are even some people trying to take advantage of the natural craze who are passing themselves off as traditional and organic when they’re not. So I’m not saying the country is perfection, filled with only individuals who would fight to the death for the vine in which they believe. But without oversentimentalizing, I can say that Georgia is a country where ideals are strong, where they still mean something, where making wine is the pursuit of a dream and not just a money-making scheme. It is because jumping into the qvevri and scrubbing them, menial and back-breaking work, is as noble as tending to the vines, where the wines are still priced not to gouge but to serve.
I came back to the facts: the Georgian heroic poem is one devoted to friendship. From The Knight in the Panther’s Skin comes this quote: “Spending on feasting and wine is better than hoarding our substance. That which we give makes us richer; that which is hoarded is lost.”
Seven centuries later, Ilia Chavchavadze, the heroic founder of the new Georgia, wrote the following in his book, How to Make Wine the Georgian Way: “Therefore the only thing left to do is not betray the true wine making; keep those Chaptalisations, Gallisations and other ‘ations’ far from us and outside our country, as well as inside; let’s place only true wines at the market.”
These sentiments are still embedded in the collective consciousness of the Georgians, who continue to live by values that resonated with us at Mevludi’s table. It is no wonder that winemakers keep making pilgrimages here and that others, like me, are attracted to Georgia’s beauty and come here for inspiration.
Curious about how deeply the ideas of Chavchavadze are embedded in the culture, I asked Mevludi, “Did you ever work chemically in this village? Was there any tradition of working as you do, naturally?”
“For the state we had to work with chemicals, but we kept natural viticulture alive in our little plots and yards. We practiced it with the wines we wanted to drink ourselves. But because everything was government-owned, some people lost the connection. It’s true. But now, the interest is in natural, and the quality is high.”
“What about the qvevri?” I asked him, thinking about that wine expert from the cooking school. “There’s huge interest outside of Georgia, but what about inside this country?
He turned more pensive and lit up another cigarette. “To take care of a qvevri is a lot of hard work. Many people have started to use plastic barrels just because they are easy to clean and it takes less time. But, yes, people are starting to love the variety of grapes and qvevri wines. But these wines are more expensive.”
“Is there resistance to their price?” I asked.
“Thirty percent of the population can afford them, but that’s probably enough.”
That is fine when you think that people are drinking less, but better, wine. But when you consider that for a wedding or party the Georgians allot three liters of wine per person — over three bottles of wine per man and just a little less per woman — there needs to be wine available at a low price. Those are never the wines that will be the ambassadors for the region; those won’t ever be the wines that draw travelers to Georgia. And the best wines of the country are still far cheaper than those made like them in other countries.
I sat back and looked at the foods piled high on the table, the same foods as in other parts of the country but with a western, spicier difference. We had dined beautifully. Stuffed with food and thoughts, we got into the car. John asked me, “Do you want to see the other qvevri maker, the one who made Zurab’s?” It sounded like a great idea to me, especially as it was only thirty minutes away and on the way to Batumi. But if I had imagined a quick, New York City–like stop-in-and-say-hi, I was deluded and hadn’t learned anything about hospitality during my time in the country.
Genno Chakhidze lived in the village of Atsana. The town, encircled by mountains, seemed relatively prosperous as there are clusters of houses and even sidewalks, things rarely seen unless they’re in a veritable city or a rehabbed tourist town like Signaghi. At one time the village had supported a ridiculous number of qvevri makers: ninety. It was known for its special clay, which was obvious from the slippery journey to Genno’s front door across a patch of land perhaps even more of a skating rink than Ramaz’s.
A slight man with a full head of dark hair and one who rarely smiled, Genno was not far removed from Mevludi’s generation. “Our family has been making qvevri for three hundred years,” he said. “All the masters are dead. I’m the last one. But I am the best there is in Georgia.”
I wasn’t surprised that he claimed to be the best because the other qvevri maker, Zaliko in Imereti, had thumped his chest and also said he was the best. Genno, like Zaliko, built the qvevri one snake of clay at a time. The renaissance in qvevri making hadn’t hit this town yet. Where Zaliko was backed up for a few years with qvevri orders, Genno was still mostly making bread ovens and clay roof tiles in his workshop.
Just as one makes choices in making wines, one can make choices in how to fire a qvevri. Both Zaliko and Genno fire from below. Zaliko’s fire is directly below the layer of qvevri, and he lays down long logs one to two feet underneath the floor of the kiln. Genno, on the other hand, dedicates a whole floor for firing, and he lays the logs about five feet deep, punching holes in the floor that allow the heat to rise. Genno doesn’t have the ability to build as large a vessel as Zaliko. His vessels are more petite, more decorative; the rope layers are rib-like, much like the traditional stone buildings in eastern Georgia. Genno said, “Yes, they are pretty. They are more ornate.” But he added proudly, “Their purpose is not looks, however; it’s strength.”
That was it. I was ready to go. Really ready. We hadn’t been traveling that long, but it had been wet and uncomfortable, and all of that eating and driving was tiring. I was covered in mud and needed a serious walk to think and work off the food I’d eaten at lunch. I was at the point in my journey when all I wanted, along with a shower and some alone time, was to see the architecture and snoop around the modern city of Batumi, letting all I had seen and listened to in a compressed time sink in. So I had hoped for a miracle, a short visit. Even though Genno asked us to come in out of the rain into his home, my hopes were raised when I couldn’t smell any food being prepared.
His wife said hello and then disappeared into the kitchen, where I saw her start to pat the dough for the khachapuri. We had not made any appointment beforehand. We had given them no indication that they should go shopping for a feast. I still held out hope. But then I heard frying and saw her lay in black catfish. I felt trapped. It was not looking good for a quick getaway. We sat down. A pitcher of wine came out, along with a plate of cucumbers. The glasses were set down.
“Zurab made a fairy tale happen in his village,” Genno said about the wine resurrection, clearly adoring Mevludi’s boss and his best customer. He added proudly, “He loves to come here, you know. I think it’s because he loves my wine.”
Then Genno offered us the wine he claimed Zurab loved, made from the vine that his father had planted. It was a grape he said was referred to as “Noah’s.” For twenty years the vine didn’t give any fruit, and Genno and his brother wanted to cut it down. But the fact that it was a link to their father prevented them, and they kept it alive. That vine, whatever it really is, gives a half-ton in each vintage. With that wine now in our glasses, Genno raised his and said, “I want to drink to my guests.”
We lifted glasses. I sipped. The wine was rustic, and that is the best thing I could say about it because it was not truly enjoyable. Then the real torture began slowly. One dish came out, then another. One wine and then another. One toast, then another. Every time I took a sip, the glass was refilled. I stopped drinking. This did not escape Genno’s attention, and I could see his watchful eye on my glass’s level.
There were breads, there were vegetables, there were cheeses, there was that fried fish; there was chicken and some boiled meat and odd, anemically colored hot dog–like sausage that made me gleeful that I was a vegetarian, but still there was much on the table suitable for me and I couldn’t offend my host. That’s when I remembered that John told me the secret: take food on the plate, and leave it there. The gesture was good enough.
Genno complained about my lack of appetite. “Maybe you’re not eating the cheese because you think it comes from the store?” He was offended. “We have three cows; each gives a different kind of milk and flavor.”
The cheeses were indeed remarkable, but not being a cow myself, my stomach had its limits.
There was enough on my untouched plate to feed an entire family. We tried to demur. We had a long ride ahead of us. Genno was not to be deterred when another round of hot khachapuri arrived. “We need to bless you before you go on your journey so that it’s a good road.”
It’s difficult in Kakheti to take leave of your host, but in comparison to the other regions of the country, it is the most reasonable. There the host must ask the guests three times to stay. If on the third time the guests remain firm, then the host can (and must) release them. In Racha it’s tough too. But from my short time in Guria, I knew that we were sunk. We all needed to be honored. Genno drank to John and the good he did for wine. He drank to John for bringing us to him. He drank to Camille and her unborn children. He drank to Keiko’s and Maika’s unborn children and mine as well, even though that door for the three of us had closed a while back. When it finally seemed that he was done and we tried to stand up from the table, Genno thundered, “You will sit and be honored!” I feared he’d bring out a sword to make his point. He shot a look at John, who shrugged with a twinkle in his eye, as if to say, “What can I do? I have a wife and children and a winery. I don’t want to lose my life.” We sat right back down, and I thought of a local proverb: “The guest is the host’s donkey. He [the host] can tie him up wherever he likes.”
Another staple of the table is tkemali, which to me seems like a Georgian version of Indian tamarind sauce. The one we had at Zurab’s was about the best I had had, and you sample it at every table you feast or eat at. The sauce is always on the Georgian table and adds zip and tang to any food, from potatoes to kinkhali to fried fish. I’d even dip my khachapuri in it. Unless you have a source for sour plums or a local wild plum tree, you’ll have to add acidity with extra lemon juice. The Georgian feast recipe calls for Santa Anna plums. Anya Von Bremzen, in her Please to the Table, uses prune plums.
4 pounds plums
4 heads garlic, chopped fine
1/2 cup fresh coriander, finely chopped
1 teaspoon finely chopped mint
1 teaspoon chopped dill
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon ground fennel seed
1 teaspoon red pepper
2 1/2 teaspoons salt
Cut plums in half.
Place the plums in a medium saucepan and add water to cover. Simmer until the plums are soft, about 10 minutes, depending on their size. Drain. When cool, skin and pit. Discard pits and skins. Pass the plums through a sieve. Return them to the saucepan. Reserve the water.
Add the garlic and coriander.
Add salt and cook on medium temperature. If too sour, add some sugar to taste.
At the end, add the coriander, mint, and remaining spices. Add in the reserved water to achieve desired thickness. The mixture should be stirred well and cooked lightly.