On Saturdays at four, a wine club comes together on Sulkhan Tsintsadze Street. Nestled in the back of a great wine store run by Zaza Grigalashvili, the tables stand in perfect symmetry as glasses are nudged into place, as a small army of wine students whisper and laugh with each other while people leak in, uncorking bottles and bringing small plates of meat and cheese. I am early, like any normal New Yorker and find a good seat. There is a sense of calm, and peaceful expectation, new faces flickering so many things. Most of the students that work here wear braces, but do not hide them - all teeth and jumping smiles.
This is my new tradition, when I can find my way here.
The bottles are presented like trophies and a few sips splash into our glasses. Nose digging in, I breath deep, like I am in a garden of wildflowers that will be gone tomorrow. Thoughts kick around, cotton candy at a summer fair, or the salt of the ocean on your skin long after you have left the beach. And then the first sip, sometimes a surprise, a revelation, a challenge, a sweet reply, or a welcome mat that says “come on in.” The wine can be confusing, or direct. Sometimes I take that second sip right away, sometimes I wait. If the first sip surprises me, I try to get my feet back on the ground.
And then we all talk, in different languages, waving our hands around in the air trying to nail down a flavor, a sense, a memory. Zaza stands like a statue on one of the great streets here, poised with a glass in one hand, a bottle perched on his hip, eyes as wise and quiet as any lion in the zoo, as he listens to us, watching our faces excited, or frustrated, or in complete bliss. The rest of the glass is tossed into the black plastic bowl on the table, some water is swished around and dumped out and then the next bottle arrives. There will be at least ten of them, and at one point the little sips of wine do get me loose and loud but never more than that. I like to take a nibble of salty Georgian cheese or maybe a little Racha ham after a sweeter wine, balancing things out.
There are more than 500 types of Georgian grapes that wine is made from, and most know just the first 5 or 6 by name - but here, the education is endless. One grape can be harvested early for a rose, or later as an earthy red. The wine can be fermented along with the skins and even the vines, or without them. They are often fermented in kvevri (giant clay jars). I am just soaking it all in, a novice, younger than the kids that work here in my own way.
Some of the wines make sense, others I do not understand. They are so different from everything else I have tasted that I sit at a loss, wondering what I have found in them, something rare and complex, maybe the heart of a country, the sweat of the maker and how hard it was to get this bottle in front of someone. Maybe it is the struggle that I sense in them, as I try to decipher it.
This last time, I sat with a man named Lado, and after we tasted one magnificent rose we said nothing, just nodded to each other in great confident smiles. He rolled the glass around, hovering over a white napkin to drink the color in, as much as everything else.
“It has so much emotion.” He said, at one point.
I agreed, not out of politeness but because I tasted it too.
Yum.
Send me a shipping address. When they show up I think you should rock their world with a couple of wines from grapes grown in the volcanic soils of mt Vesuvius. ;)