“So it’s my last day and we’re going to a place that is so divested of wine that there’s not even a vine hiding in the trees?”
“That’s almost right,” John said.
I had had a similarly disgruntled reaction to going to Meskheti a mere two days before — it seemed a decade ago. But John had redeemed himself. Those grape hunters had restored my faith in a regional revival. Still, I suggested, “Maybe we should just get on the road? We have a six-hour ride ahead of us to get to Iago’s for dinner.” I was calculating that if we left early, we could pick up some more Caesar mushrooms from the Imereti stands that we had to pass on the way back. But John had promised his friend Stefan Diasamidze, whom he called “the shepherd,” that we were coming. “Stefan’s mother has been cooking for days,” he said. “There is no way we can disappoint her.”
So I swallowed my own disappointment and watched the hills grow into mountains. We shared our road with roaming cows, pigs, and sheep, and the fields were dotted with haystacks made by pitchforks, not by machines, looking like Brueghel paintings. At one time this area was crawling with vines; were some of the old varieties in need of resurrection? Not exactly recognizable at all anymore but safely growing in some vine libraries were Brola, Khopaturi, Klarjuli, Mekrenchkhi, Burdzghala, Kviristava, Shvashura, Jineshi, Satsuri, and Batomura.
We arrived in rural, hilly Qvashta and drove past high corn until we stopped in front of a house with a very active farm with soil the color of copper. The family made everything there; even the wheat was milled on location. John’s young friend Stefan came to greet us. We were making a long detour just for lunch with his mother, father, wife, and new baby.
We had left Keiko and Maika back in Batumi, so now, a smaller group, we were ushered into a small, sun-filled living room, and we took our chairs at a table that was done up fancily, with folded napkins in the glasses — a flourish I’d not seen in a home. Out came the conversation and food. John was right: Stefan’s mother was a great cook. Turkish influences were obvious, and she had thoughtfully made her grape leaves meat-free out of respect for the vegetarians among us. As we ate lunch, the television stayed on, displaying an endless looped tape of Stefan’s marriage, which had put a stop to his shepherding. Now that he was a family man, he needed to be home, taking care of his family. He wanted a more grounded way of life. But to John he’ll always be “the shepherd.”
Stefan had supplied us with his own bottle of Pheasant’s Tears wine, left over from John’s previous visit, but then John said, “Stefan’s own wine is excellent.”
“You make wine?” I said, eager to taste it.
Stefan blushed. He started to deny it. But then his shy desire for a life as a winemaker started to come through. He admitted he wanted to bring back wine culture into the area.
Sneaky John; he always had a reason for what he was doing. He knew my reason for traveling through Georgia was to learn as much as I could about the past and present wine situation in the country, but also to know how valid my suspicion was that the man in the cooking school and his ilk — the new and the modern and the young — were ready to throw Georgian traditional wines under the bus. He knew I had my concerns that those of the new generation would want cushy wine jobs with big paychecks and wouldn’t want to get their hands dirty. With the bulk of the natural guys being older, who would continue along the path? Yes, there were exceptions, like a man who looked like a fourteen-year-old, Temuri Dakishvili of Teleda in Kakheti. He was a second-generation professional winemaker who flirted with the concept of natural more than his father did. There was Alex, the kid from Tuxedo Park, New York, with Georgian roots who had just entered the fold as well. There were those grape hunters we met in Meskheti.
Stefan’s story was very different. Even though his family had been apostates centuries back, he was born a Muslim. Yet he had recently converted back to Georgian Orthodoxy. He had had no previous connection to wine but was coming to it now with a newly discovered passion, as a connection to the ancestors who had been forced to convert under the Turks.
There in front of me was a young man not yet thirty who would not be afraid of the hard work, who would not be afraid to clean a qvevri, who was committed to organic out of an innate respect of nature, and, what’s more, who was wise enough to know he had to start slowly. He was a little timid, free of ego, but full of desire. He wanted to make a living doing what he loved, and I had a sense he would be a careful and heartfelt winemaker. Working as a shepherd, watching nature and living with it, would serve as excellent training.
We should have started on our way, but we were mesmerized. We were hooked in by the story, by the food. And, to make it harder for us to go, Stefan’s father pulled out a goatskin, off of which he had chopped the feet and turned into a rustic bagpipe. Being an old folkie, I had been around pipes of all kinds before, but this was the first one where the instrument was a recently killed animal. The father started to blow out multivoiced polyphonic music with it. The oldest form of polyphony — textural music that goes in a million directions — is supposedly from Georgia. Like tarragon, not everyone loves it. But give it some time and the music haunts. Polyphony, the traditional music of Georgia, whether in instrumentation or in singing, had been on my mind since the conversation John and I had had the previous night in front of the Black Sea waves slapping against the rocky beach.
We had arrived in Batumi minutes before dusk. With the sea to our right, we dropped down into the Dubaiesque city, catching the last glimpses of lush tropical greens and brilliant-beaked flowers and a statue of Medea holding a fleece. Batumi was the ancient kingdom of Colchis, the very city Jason had come to claim in order to reclaim his place on the throne. However, in order to succeed he had to go through a series of impossible tasks, which he was able to accomplish only because of the love, help, and sorcery of the complicated Medea. Perhaps if what Jason had actually been looking for was good qvevri wine, he would have found it then. Centuries later? No. In 1723 Batumi became part of the Ottoman Empire, and the mass conversions and ripping out of the vines commenced. Polyphony endured; the vine did not.
Camille, John, and I went out into the night, to find some Ajarian khachapuri. But afterward, around midnight, I said, “I haven’t come this far not to feel the Black Sea, have I?”
It had been on all of our minds. Camille, a surfer, wanted to not only get her foot in it as I did. She wanted to plunge. Overcome with youthful desire and the need for exercise, Camille stepped out of her clothes on the rocky beach and flung herself into the sea’s dark soup, threading in and out of it like a blond seal. As John and I kept a watchful eye on her, he brought up music again.
“Natural wine and polyphony were separated at birth,” he said.
I had heard the theory before. I was weary of it. “John, I understand it’s your metaphor; music was the reason you came to Georgia, but it’s just not mine.”
“Hear me out,” he pleaded.
“Even the California wine consultant uses it as an analogy.”
“Are you ready to stop and listen to me?” he asked.
“I mean, it’s almost cliché to talk about natural wine as an old 78 rpm record counterpointed by the modern and digital,” I said. “Krug calls wine a symphony; God knows what the consultant does; another guy does wine and music pairings. Other people have compared natural wine to dystonic jazz.”
He put his hand on my shoulder for emphasis that I should just shut up. “Okay,” I said, opening up my mind and heart. I looked out across the night sea as the wind picked up.
We turned to watch Camille swim, and he started: “This isn’t about digital or dissonant jazz at all. Ready?”
I took a breath and shook my head affirmatively. “Ready.”
“Okay then. When you have pure fifths, you get ringing, goose-pimply, hair-raising harmonies,” he said. “For the modern ear, used to the standardized, this can be too edgy, although in the seeming dissonance is actually pure harmony. Same with many natural wines. The very thing that gives them that edge is that they are not sandpapered, not shellacked.”
“Yes, this is the digitized theory,” I said. I was being difficult, but I was tired of hearing the same arguments time and again.
He continued smiling, and went on. “Our wines still have that glorious roughness around the edges that is their life, their purity. Their authenticity.”
I felt sheepish for having been so dismissive.
“Keto says her songs might be beautiful because they are the accumulative voice of thousands of her ancestors.” It was then that something started to register with me and that his take on the collective history began to move me. “Gela will say his wine is special because of the layers of time and wisdom. Keto and Gela both see themselves as fostering something, nurturing something much greater than themselves.”
Both music and wine — especially natural wine — were visceral. It was exactly as John said, especially when I clocked the reactions people had to the natural wines of Georgia, reactions that can run the gamut from curiosity to violence to passion.
Was that why I felt so protective about Georgia’s wine? Because in a dehumanized world natural wine is the symbol of all that is real and feeling? Natural wine can certainly be correct and flawless, but better still are those with the complexity of a flawed beauty. There can be a little volatility, a little breathlessness, an uncontrolled changeability. In a world where there is plenty of fake, the wines made naturally are honest.
This was John’s point. Qvevri wine wasn’t analogous to just any music, but especially with Georgia’s polyphony and its many webbed imperfections that meld together. It is linked to the beauty of blended sound waves, which come together in harmony and disharmony. It is about the camaraderie of experiencing wine in the same way as someone else. It is about the harmony of connection, almost like a shared hallucination. Polyphony is multivoiced, but it smacks of history and culture, of music and religion. Its magic is woven into music, and that music holds the fabric of Georgian wine itself. John’s point was complicated enough, mind-bending as well. But in the end, as Stefan’s father played in the living room, it all became clearer to me.
“There is the connection to vibrancy and vibrations,” John had said. The legless goatskin, as played by the elder man in the living room, was plaintive, and one skin bleated out a hypnotic web of sounds, polyphony out of one instrument. The sound seemed to reach right down to my big toe. Georgian wine, when done right, hits those vibrations. The lapsed shepherd was going to make wonderful wine.
We prepared to leave and were prevented by the call for one more toast from Stefan’s father. I wasn’t fearful; this was Adjara and not Guria; I didn’t expect to be trapped this time. But I didn’t expect the toast to concern me.
“To your brother’s health,” the father said. “May he thrive. Most important, next year, you bring him to us. We will help him heal.”
I promised, even though I knew the promise was a feeble one. I so very much wanted to believe Georgia’s sorcery could bring health. The only thing that Georgia could help me with at this point was its love.
Moved by the sound of the plaintive instrument, the prayers for my brother, and Stefan’s wine, which I hoped I would get to taste, I imagined the day when I would meet his fans in Paris or London or Sydney or Verona, and Stefan would proudly show his wines and his country to the world. It would profoundly change his life, and the band of natural winemakers throughout Georgia, not just those in the east, would thrive and become known.
With a happy Camille in the backseat babbling about it all, Georgia had proved to be as exotic and yet as civilized a place as she’d ever been. We stopped along the way, by the side of the Black Sea at the road stands, to buy the grape-sized, intensely aromatic pekhva.
By the time we arrived at Iago’s, John had received a call that the qvevri had arrived in the Loire, and Gela was busy burying them in Thierry Puzelat’s winery. It was time for celebratory Chinuri. After all the years of shipping barrels out of the country, France was actually importing a different vessel. But first we toured Iago’s new winery, which had double the amount of qvevri. “And where’s Marina’s qvevri?” I asked, eager to see the continuation of his wife Marina’s wine.
Iago looked hangdog.
“But why!” I gasped. It seemed incomprehensible. The wine was so very good. It was so important for women to be seen in the wine world, as it can in truth get to be too much of a boys’ club.
“There was no room; I needed all the qvevris this year,” Iago explained.
“Marina and Téa didn’t get their qvevri?” I repeated. I mean, how could he? The doting husband Iago? How could he not take care of his wife? I was crushed.
He looked crestfallen. Marina looked at her husband with love but as if she was about to give him a playful smack on the side of his head and say, “You see?”
“Next year,” Iago promised us.
Georgia was sending me one lesson after another, including the one that what is truly yours can never be lost. If Marina and Téa’s wines were truly theirs, they would come back. I tried to get past the disappointment. I was presented with a Sharpie and we all signed Iago’s new wall, and then I commenced with my last feast.
Ajarian Chirbuli
Initially I thought that John was creating this breakfast dish from his head, but it turns out it’s a version of an Ajarian chirbuli, the region’s classic breakfast dish. It both tastes and looks very much like a relative to the Israeli shakshuka, where the eggs are poached in the sauce, the tomatoes, and the spice. Where it differs is the luscious use of fresh herbs.
Being a heat lover, John adds his own twist; it suits me and seems perfectly Georgian: he layers in some green hatch chilies. If you’d rather, you could add any hot pepper or a little hot adjika. It goes exceedingly well with chacha, by the way, though you might then want to go right back to sleep.
2 onions
2 tablespoons butter or oil
1 teaspoon cornmeal
2 juicy tomatoes
1 medium-sized hot chili, chopped (optional)
10 walnuts
1 clove garlic
1/2 cup fresh green coriander
1/2 cup dill
1/2 cup basil
4 eggs
1/2 teaspoon dried coriander
1 heaped teaspoon red pepper
salt to taste
Chop the onions and fry in butter on a low temperature for 4–5 minutes, stirring frequently.
Add 1 teaspoon cornmeal. Mix with the onions.
Chop the tomatoes and chili and add to the pan of fried onions.
Grind the walnuts. Crush the garlic, then cover the walnuts and garlic with water and bring to the boil. Reduce the temperature to low and add this walnut/garlic mixture to the tomato mixture. Add the 1/2 teaspoon of dried coriander, heaped teaspoon of red pepper, and salt. Stir thoroughly. Continue to cook on a low heat for 2–3 minutes.
Stir and continue to cook on a very low heat for 4 minutes, stirring frequently.
Chop the fresh green coriander, dill, and basil and add to the pan.
Stir thoroughly and reduce heat to very low. Either cook the eggs separately, poaching them carefully and then placing them in the sauce, or carefully crack the eggs and pour onto the chirbuli sauce.
Continue to cook for 2–3 minutes. The yolk of the eggs should be runny. Remove from heat and serve immediately.