the world he helped to build

a legacy

Jaba leans into the conversation I am having, and interrupts. “For Georgians to lose wine, is like they lose a vital organ. It is like to lose your kidneys.”

We are not just at some Saturday tasting. This is a night dedicated to a Malhkaz, a dear friend to everyone crammed into this familiar place, a man that played a great part in making Georgian wine what it is today, and far into the future. He passed away before his work was done, and left a great hole in the lives and hearts of everyone around him. The tasting is not a memorial, more a celebration of an event he had planned to organize - to taste old bottles of Georgian natural wine and understand if they suffer over the years. It is a beautiful question that does not have an answer - not until the curators of the evening dusted off bottles tucked away, and brought them to share, inspiring many winemakers to bring their own old bottles to add to the pile, opening them finally - letting them blossom in the night air, touching familiar lips and new ones as well.

The bottles are uncorked with short and long stories, with anecdotes and soft words for this man, the glue that held so much together, now gone. The price of admission that is collected will all be sent to his family, in pure Georgian style.

There are toasts while standing on chairs, with shining faces, glasses held high. One winemaker explains that there was a case he was supposed to bring Malhkaz, but he did not do it in time, so he brought the wine for us tonight, a salty krakhuna that burns a little smile across your face as you sip it. It will turn you into a cheshire cat for an hour, without lifting a finger.

Some bottles are well over ten or fifteen years old - a lifetime ago it seems. There are ones from wild grapes that grow at the top of the tallest vines. There are ones I have never heard of, and everything in-between. I sit next to another expat, a newcomer to our odd little corner of the world and he is full of questions. He has stumbled into an oasis and he knows it. The world may be going to hell, but we are here at this long table, our noses digging deep into glasses smelling wild honey and oranges, wet hay, the ocean, the wind and the trees - we sip carefully and then all at once, the rare and the humble all twirling down to our stomachs, chasing it with fresh bread and salty cheese.

This is the world this man helped to build.