Georgia ReWined: Roaming the Birthplace of Wine with Noel Brockett

Class transcript:

Releasing the hounds. Welcome, welcome one and all. It's been a minute having to readjust to this monthly cycle, but it is a pleasure to see all of you here. Some of you with considerably shorter hair than you once had, myself included. And we are honored, of course, to welcome back old friend Noel Brockett. Say hello to the people, Noel. I'll introduce you again. Excellent. And our oldest friend, Zoe Nystrom, joining us, who continues to join us and is, you know, extremely underpaid for the sake of the work that she does here. Zoe, we are honored that you can be here. Thank you. It is a pleasure.

And, you know, so much of who and what we are as a restaurant and a community of people that occasionally gathers to drink wine on Zoom is, you know, due you. So thank you. At any rate, welcome. It is an idyllic October afternoon. It doesn't get much more beautiful than this. I see some of you are outside. Cheers to you all outside. Well played. We have a suitably beautiful subject for the occasion, and that, of course, is Georgia. And we are thrilled to welcome back one of Georgia's greatest champions, Mr. Noel Brockett. Do you have Georgian citizenship yet? I feel like you should. You know, somebody's trying to apply it for me, but I haven't gotten it yet. Honorary. Honorary status at the very least, Mr. Noel Brockett.

And Noel is adding to the list of his credentials. He has added movie star. He has added movie star. He has added movie star. He has added movie star to that list. And we are here to celebrate that star turn. And we are here to celebrate his docuseries, Georgia Rewind, like we needed another excuse to revisit Georgia. But the theme for the sake of our get-together today really is the diversity of Georgian wine. There is no one singular Georgian wine. There are many. And, you know, Georgia historically was a linguistic group that evolved, you know, over thousands of years and coalesced into a modern republic against all odds. But there's just tremendous diversity contained therein and reflected in the people's, the cuisine, and the wine, certainly as well. And that's something that we want to celebrate and shine a light on today. And something that Noel has done for the sake of Georgia Rewind through five episodes.  Apollon Kerselitse, Bayi Gavansa, Georgie Abuladze, and of course their dog Bora. Gogi Tevzadze and Gogi Dakishvili. I've been practicing my Georgian pronunciation, hopefully it shows. It is a relatively easy language when transliterated. It is phonetic enough, even though they, you know, drop a few vowels here and there, but a beautiful language and a country of Koth's as well, which naturally we love to celebrate. We've got a solid crowd for an idyllic October afternoon. Thrilled to have you all with us. We're going to begin as we do with a bit of verse and we are going to work our way west to east for the sake of these wines. I'll pull up a map so you can get a kind of a fuller sense of what that entails.

But we're going to be starting with Datto's wine in Gurria. Before that, of course, a poem. And I mentioned, I've mentioned Georgia, country of poets, country of wine makers. This comes to us from Ailia Chabze. That's, I butchered that, apologies, Ailia has shuffled off this Earth many moons ago. But he was a prominent poet and wine maker and statesman in the 19th century. Really had a critical role in kind of developing a modern wine industry in Georgia in the 19th century. This is his elegy to the country. The full moon cast a palette late across our neutral sky. Native country space distant mountains edged in white began dissolving into space. There was no call, no bell or bird, no parents' voice to soothe and guide, though sometimes moaning could be heard deep in a cardinal countryside.

Alone I stood, a shadow keeps my country in the darkened past. Oh God, my country sleeps and sleeps, when will we awake at last? Um, so uh, a fitfully um kind of mournful uh allergy um there to Georgia, which is really in the midst of awakening, and that's what we're celebrating today. Um, with no bracket, the star of Georgia rewind. This is Cartoon no uh, the host of Georgia, Georgia rewind. If you haven't watched, we will post the links again in our recap, but uh, I'm I'm really excited about Cartoon No, and Uh, we have Uh, The Man Himself, Uh, joining us as well. And Uh, we will hear from him very briefly Uh, very shortly.

I'm gonna give you just kind of a a quick taste of Georgia, the country, eight thousand years of wine history distilled into pithy sound bites as we are want to do Um, naturally we're gonna give an American Um, The first word Uh, Mr. John Steinbeck. This is from Uh, his Russian Journal. I am you know Uh, utilizing Uh, and tremendous resource Um, Lisa Granik Uh, master of wine Um, Spitfire of a small woman for the nature Um, this is if you want to know more about Uh, the country and its wines um to my mind the best resource um steinbeck wrote a russian journal about his trips to russia but much of the tome was devoted to celebrating um uh the georgian spirit and he wrote uh about the georgia about the russians mind you uh that the russians uh they spoke of georgians as supermen as great drinkers great dancers great musicians great workers and lovers and they spoke of the country as a kind of second heaven um uh and then this is lisa uh georgia known to its inhabitants as socrates bello um uh which is essentially uh land of the cart bella speakers or orland uh cartbellians um uh has seven different climate Zones 49 different soil types and hundreds of great varieties, uh, at the very least over 400, um, the Georgians claim over 500, um, uh, at any rate tremendous diversity befitting uh its status as a birthplace of the Georgian culture and the European wine rival, all within a country uh of fewer than 70,000 square miles, just smaller than the Republic of Ireland and a little larger than the state of West Virginia. The Georgian language is a tongue-twisting jumble of constant clusters, challenging the English speaker; it has 8,000 years of wine culture and winemaking history, but at the same time its current wine industry is remarkably young um uh and i'm gonna pull up uh a map so you can get a sense of uh you know just where uh we lie here we are you know uh very much at the crossroads of civilizations here uh between um you know modern east and west um you know i'm ever mindful of the fact that um you know that whole map is very much a uh eurocentric construct but um you know i come from a eurocentric corner of the world so um we will you know perpetuate it for the time being um uh this is uh the caucuses um it is the region in which um uh it is thought that the uh georgia of the european republic of america uh came into existence it is thought and may be the case that is uh There was a prehistoric a great vine Vitis vinifera, which is a species of grapevine.

There are just under 100 members of that family, many of which uh existed in the Americas, but uh the uh wine grape uh that goes into everything we drink, almost everything we drink, uh descended from this Vinifera, which is thought to have been first domesticated in this corner of the world. Um, the The Georgians claim privacy when it comes to that incidence of first domestication and wine is so wrapped up in their ritual life that they have spent a ton of money trying to, you know Scientifically verify the grape vines' origin in their corner of the world. But it is indisputed that at the very least in this neighborhood, in the Transcaucasus, Vinifera was first domesticated around 8,000 years ago.

The very word itself, wine, comes from the Georgian word 'gavino.' They call their own language Cartouli. It coalesced at the beginning of the modern era. The word Georgia itself, it should be said, has nothing to do with St. George. Satiida come from the Persians. Georgian 'gerge' or the Greek 'geos,' which itself means earth, which I, you know, found fascinating for the sake of doing my research here. The Georgians were early adopters for the sake of Christianity in the modern era, which makes sense. You know, wine and being at the central of their ritual life. You know, Jesus is a good ambassador. The whole water into wine thing and, you know, sacrament of the body and blood must have appealed to the Georgians. They were the second state to adopt Christianity as their state religion.

Legend has it that St. Nino of Cappadocia preached with a cross of plated grape vines secured with her own hair. And to this day, that is the cross form in the Georgian Orthodox Church. The Georgians have suffered over their thousands of years, you know, as many invasions as you can imagine. They are a sandwich between massive empires in Russia, Persia. And, you know, Ottoman Turkey, the golden era of Georgian cultures in the 11th and 12th century, headed by Kings David and Tamar, King Tamar, actually, Queen. She was such a queen that they felt like Queen didn't do her justice. This is obviously not a very woke era, but Tamar still a hugely popular Georgian name. Sadly, the golden age didn't last long. In 1213, the Golden Horde swept.

Down upon Georgia, Tamerlane alone invaded eight times the poor Georgians, eight times. And, you know, I think a lot of that history is embedded in the very Georgian language. They toast 'Waltam Jost', which means the victory, which tells you that they weren't winning a lot, you know. So, you know, the toast itself certainly tells you something about, you know, this proud warrior ethos. Russia remained largely disinterested until Catherine the Great set her sights on expansion. And the 18th century, and then at that point, Georgians recast their lot with the Russian Empire because they saw the looming Ottoman menace to their set. And the Soviets quickly developed, or the Russians at that point, at least in the 19th century, quickly developed a taste for Georgian wine and the modern wine industry developed.

Soviet rule is very difficult for the Georgians, despite the fact that Stalin himself is from Georgia. But the Soviets made wine a really, you know, the central agricultural product that came out of the country, beginning with a Red Army invasion in 1921. The Georgians had a brief two years of independence after the fall of Tsarist Russia, but that didn't last long, sadly. The Soviets, they quickly streamlined this tremendous diversity for the sake of 400 grapes into basically six: Cazzatelli, Cucurri, Svani, Saporavi, Sivka. It was very much a quantity over quality paradigm, such that, you know, modern Georgians, a lot of OGs are skeptical of wine in a bottle because to them it equals Soviet plunk and not something delicious that you would get from your own cellar that we safeguarded and made in spite of all the forces allied against us throughout the Soviet era.

Georgia emerges into, you know, kind of this century. It's just kind of miraculously intact as a nation. They barely survived the 1990s. It's called the Black 90s in Georgia. As of 1997, you know, 1997, the wine industry only existed really as a handful of larger producers and persisted on a small scale in individual homes and villages. But flash forward 2019, over 1,300 producers and growing. So true renaissance Georgia truly awakening, diversifying beyond Russia as its, you know, only trading partner and emerging onto the international scene as never before and as something that we have celebrated in the past and are thrilled to celebrate again today with none other than Noel Brockett, the man, the myth, the legend. Noel, you have launched a five-part beautiful docuseries. Complete with the cartoon version of yourself.

How did this project come about, sir? Well, thanks. It's always its such a pleasure to hang out with Bill and all of you. Good friends and good times and lovers of Georgia. Yeah. How did this project get started? I was thinking about that as we started talking today. I've been in it so deeply. But, I what I thought about you, Bill, is that it really probably wouldn't have happened if I hadn't. I spent like nine months, almost nine months reading Walt Whitman with with some friends over Zoom in pandemic times. And we read through the 'Song of Myself', the deathbed version of something. I love poetry, but I'm not really well-versed in it. And so, in the midst of the pandemic, we started a poetry group and we went to a small liberal arts college here in Annapolis where we like to talk about things.

St. John's College. Great. That's right. Which we spent some time on poetry, but I didn't. And so anyway, I read a lot. We read that I was living in Walt's world. And and so I gave me. What was it like to live in Walt's world? It was great. I really, I was, it was life-changing in a lot of ways. And and maybe we'll even share a verse with you that kind of got it kicked off for me. But the idea is that it, you know, just gives me this idea of trying something new. You know, and it was in the time of pandemic. You know, you're not. You're not selling wine the same way, trying to think about what really inspires is that there's so much to Georgia as our bills and our my favorite analogy is that there's so many threads and any thread that you pull, you know, you just it just keeps going and going and then you find another thread and you find another.

And so what I love about Georgia is its depth. And I love that it's a place that is connecting kind of new possibilities with ancient traditions. They're a place that has to find a way about. How to reconcile oneself with the past, and it's a very different sort of positive view of tradition, you know, that exists in Georgia and and there, you know, at the same time, you have this large break of almost 70, 80 years where you have this other political system and then you have, you know, revolution and all sorts of terrible times. And and I just think that somehow the relationship that Georgia has with wine and how it continues to do it, it speaks to me so deeply that I think.

It also speaks to anybody who gets a chance to come on to like a class like this or has a chance to visit Georgia. And you realize that something different is happening there. And if I'm interested in wine, I think you have to be interested in a place like Georgia, because I think it has something to teach us. And so that's kind of why we thought about is like, you know, we can do these things, but is there a way that we can show that to people? You know, we can't travel now. People can't go there. Is there a way that we can show that there are active, alive people who are living in this. Sort of fertile soil of eight thousand years of winemaking, but have are having in some ways not to start from scratch, but in other ways having to start from scratch.

And there's this kind of life and love and passion and diversity. And so that's kind of where the idea of Georgia Rewind came up. And the name came from a guy who we couldn't have done it without. Is that classic Georgian story? Is that one of the guys that we had started working with in 2020, a guy named Sandro Giardinieri, he makes a wine, we work with him on the wine side, he makes some lovely wines under the Rocha label. And he's also, of course, like all Georgians, he's a trained, you know, trained director and had done stuff at the London Film School and all sorts of things like this. And so we kind of that together, we're like that, and then having a person that we could really go to and who also had an idea, we could marry it together and we could actually.

Get this crazy project done for vastly small amounts of money. And, you know, and kind of we shot for ten days and got what we got, which is really, as I've learned. Wait, I feel like for those of you who are kind of not in on the on the joke, you know, Georgia has a thriving film industry. And it feels like per capita must have more film students than any other country in the world. Yeah, but it feels like a very Georgian thing to do either. You know, the joke is that, yeah, they're always very artistic. I mean, it's the idea of making music, you know, graduating as a director, being part of the arts - it's just a requisite of culture to be a cultured person in Georgia.

It's like, again, and there's some problems with it. You know, I had one of my best friends in Georgia graduated as a film director at the age of 19, which I would just quibble. Like, why would you let anybody do that? You're at 19. You don't have any experience. Like, you know, art is about life. You know, you're supposed to have experience of life. So, but in the sense that they just love art. And so, that's it's very funny that, of course, he has three different babies, wine, making films and all this, and none of them make him any money. But that's what a true Georgian does. Yeah, no, there's there's real beauty in it. And no one I feel like, you know, it's like stateside if you were a philosophy major, people's, you know, what are you going to do for a job?

And, you know, in Georgia, you know, I feel like, you know, for the sake of the artistic pursuits, you know, they're like, of course, you're going to do that. You know, it's just, you know, part of the fabric of, you know, who we are and what we want out of out of our lives. And I think, you know, wine is very much a part of that journey in a kind of innate way and in a way that I hadn't experienced before visiting. I'm going to pull up a map. And I think it's hugely fitting. That. That we begin our journey in Guria because it is a region that is, you know, essential to Noel's experience of Georgia. You can see we are abutting the Black Sea here.

That is the Black Sea being consumed by a cartoon cover over there in the map. And Noel, why is Guria such a huge part of your life? Yeah. And as the film, as the film starts out, the very first phrase is that Guria is a particular love for me. And it and it was important for me that it didn't intentionally be that way. But it was important for me that it ended up that being the beginning, because, yeah, Guria is a tiny region. That's this little blue, you know, dark, slightly darker blue region. Sometimes you look at that map like it's teal, exactly. Yeah. That light blue is actually a separate region there. So you have to make sense. So, yeah, it's a tiny, tiny little place. It's okay. No.

So worst, worst screen share ever. Hopefully no one is yakking at home. There you go. You can see, you can see a Guria. Yeah. So, so, yeah, the Guria is a particular love for me because this I married, you know, I got into Georgia because I married a woman, met her on crisp fall nights here back in 2007 in Annapolis, Maryland. And she her mother is from a region. The main region is called Ozergeti, and her mother lives two kilometers. Outside of that into a little village called Sital Mata, which means Red Mountain. And this is the place that she her grandmother stayed there, even though terrible sort of poverty things happening during the 90s. You know, literally our entire house got looted.

But this is a hundred and fifty year old house that was built by her great great great grandfather by hand. And and over three generations, every generation since that great great grandfather has had some woman come and say, oh, my God, I'm going to die. I'm going to die. And she's like, you know, you can't say this house isn't going to die. And this was first, it was Mary. And then my mother-in-law, Lika, brought her. She had moved to Tbilisi, the capital, to live there and and just about five years ago, sort of decided that she was going to go back and live there full-term and start a business there and everything like that. That's a side note. But my wife would go back every summer.

And this is the place that she says, you know. I'm. I know we lost. No. Um. I'm very sad. I hope Noel will return shortly. I know his family's watching football in the adjoining room, so hopefully they're not sucking up all the bandwidth. I can't text Noel. Well, at any rate, let's hold on to live on hope for the time being. But the green wine we are enjoying here comes from a close friend of Noel and singularly great varietal in Chalkberry. So Dato Kabidze is the winemaker. And I'm going to pull up a still from the docuseries here. And you can get a sense of, you know, just what a preposterously beautiful region you're dealing with. And in Western Korea, Georgia, you have this influential climatically of the Black Sea.

So the climate is wetter and cooler than it is in Georgia as you go further east. And in the Soviet era, the Soviets streamlined production, you know, from 400 over 400 to six varietals, essentially six to eight varietals. But they equally streamlined agricultural production by centering major commercial winemaking in Kiketi in the east, which meant regions like Guria to the west were overlooked. Even though they had as deep a history of winemaking as Kiketi, it just wasn't as viable commercially. And Guria became a essentially a to the extent that it was a place that was making, you know, a consumer product, a hotbed of tea production. And in a lot of the Gurian vineyards that you walk, you will find tea plants, you know, scattered along the edge of these individual parcels on top of, you know, the vines.

And this particular varietal is unique in the sense that it is incredibly thin-skinned. So Chakveri is a very late ripener. You know, you're dealing with a cooler, wetter climate. Oh, Mel's back. Beautiful. Yes, I'm back. Sorry. No worries. So I was just, you know, kind of bringing them into Guria geographically in terms of its climate. And Dato, as a champion of this underdog grape, Chakveri, that has, relatively,  little pigmentation to it. And so, you know, never really makes truly red wines, as we would consider them, you know, always aspirationally red. It's harvested cartoonishly late. You know, the local wisdom that I heard there was that, you know, they get wind of the first snow and they harvest. And it's typically November, mind you.

And it's a grape that they work with in different styles. And this is kind of like the aspirational red. You know, this sees how much time on the skins, no? It's one month. Yeah. And somebody, I think, asked at the very beginning, one month. Well, why didn't this pick up? And yeah, it's a green grape. It's a pink skin grape. And so it, you know, even with a few hours on the skins, it'll just give a very small tint. Whereas most places, you know, most grapes would give you a nice dark rosé. So it never gets darker than this, even after as much as you get. And I love, you know, wines that, you know, kind of live in this in between. You know, it challenges assumptions of, you know, genre in a really amazing way.

You know, is it rosé? Is it red? You know, who gives a rat's ass? It's delicious. You know, why do we care what color it is anyway? I mean, it's beautiful. But, you know, I think if you serve this to someone as a red wine, you know, they might, you know, take umbrage. And certainly in terms of the flavor of this wine, you know, it has this, you know, savory energy about it. Maybe that's much more reminiscent of a traditional white than a red. You were speaking earlier of your, you know, kind of, you know, your special attachment to Gurria. Yeah. I don't know where I got left off. I kept, I went going. I saw that you guys were, like, crazy. So we left off at the proud matriarchs who would not let this house down.

Yeah. Which is the story of Gurria. So the idea is that my wife basically said, you know, I can bring you to all these amazing places, you know, these eighth century, you know, these eighth century B.C. kind of inhabited places. I can show you all these beautiful mountains. But if you want to understand who I am, you have to come to Gúrria. And that, you know, inevitably everybody that we ever take obviously falls in love with Gúrria. And when you think about Gúrria, it's like what's there to see other than it's just a unique place. And I'm sure you've experienced that, too. It's just a different vegetation, a different way, a kind of speed of life, a different kind of humor. And so it's a place that's just fast and funny.

And they're known for their humor. Some of the most famous Georgians are Gúrrians are, you know, in the comedy area. And then also they have this specific way of singing that's okay, Georgian folk music, everybody should go Google it. It's amazing anyway. But Gurria is the one place where like, okay, go a little bit higher. They have a fourth voice. It's like yodeling. And it's just really crazy. That's wild. And it's just a place that I feel really at home at. And so in 2016, you know, I really loved the Gurrian wines. But to be frank, Gurrian wine didn't really exist. I mean, most people, it was almost completely killed out in the Soviet time, just the knowledge of how to do it.

The nineties were also were terribly poor, so people ripped up vineyards and planted hazelnuts just to have something to export and eat. And so Gurrian wines and why we started in the West in the films, they're just behind. They're really just, like, 20 years behind in terms of infrastructure. But the grape varieties, the traditions are there. And in Gurria, this is this tradition where thousands and thousands of years ago, they were actually planting grapes alongside trees. So the traditional way of harvesting grapes in Gurria, because it's a very mountainous region, you don't have big valleys; they would plant trees, plant a vine. They would naturally climb up it. And they would harvest it up there because what they found was that it grew better. They didn’t have to use any products.

And that thing that Bill is showing you on the label is a specific basket. It’s called Gideli. This is, like, the, you know, patented thing from Gurria, which is this specific basket that is woven. And it has a hook so that you could climb the ladder up in the tree and pick the grapes and hook it onto the branches and bring it down safely. You don’t want to, on a ladder, you want your center of gravity close in, right? So you don’t want those big old baskets like this. Exactly. And so this is, you know, it’s the essence of what’s permaculture. And that's the kind of thing that Gurria has, is that Gurria isn't necessarily rich in sort of, like, famous landmarks. But what it's rich in is these ancient varieties.

There's only 62 varieties that are known from there in a place that's, like, one of the second smallest regions in Georgia. So, again, a place that's really far behind but has a ton of, I think, just has a ton of wines that are particularly appealing probably to the people here. You know, they tend to be crisper, brighter, higher acidity because you're getting a much more humid climate. All the hot air gets trapped in this place of Gurria. It's a subtropical climate. That's why it grows tea. It's the only other subtropical climate that's growing tea outside of China, really, and the farthest north as you can get. And so you have one village that's growing mandarins, like, literally 10 kilometers from our house, our aunt's house. She has a whole mandarin grove.

But where we are, we can't grow mandarins. So it's that kind of diversity that's happening in this tiny little place. So, yeah, I really think Gurria is a wild and wonderful place. And Dato is a guy who started making wine because guess what? Somebody, some of his, he doesn't even know who, of his ancestors planted a grapevine 150 years old, 150 years ago, two grapevines that were growing on trees. The trees have since been cut down. But guess what he makes wine from? Those still, those same exact vines. And that's the kind of, like, image. The image of Gurria is, like, we know things were happening here. You know, maybe it was 100 years ago, maybe it was 150 years ago. But, like, we have to get back to it, you know?

So that's the kind of idea of the Georgia Rewind. Yeah, I can remember being in a Gurrian, you know, vineyard, and it felt like a cloud forest, you know? You know, I felt like, you know, there's a magic to it, but there's a sense of that subtropical quality that's very different than any other region I went to when I was visiting. Georgia, you know? And, you know, I think there's a freshness to the wines that kind of, you know, proceeds, you know, from those conditions. Yeah, and this is one of my, you know, favorite, you know, wines that you bring in. And it's certainly one of our favorite wines to pair with. And, you know, it's a grape that, you know, had, you know, as I understand it, almost disappeared.

And Datto played a big role. And, you know, repopularizing it. Totally, yeah. I mean, Traueri, it was always known as Gurrians as it's the famous, the most famous one. But, yeah, it was very underused. And Datto obviously helped a couple other people propagate their vineyards from his 150-year-old vines. But at the same time, it's having a resurgence. And if you like the rosé, I'd throw in a pitch for trying. What would you say? Yeah. You know, we call it the amber version of this, which is not amber, really. It has zero skin contact. But it's really worth trying and fun to compare those two, you know, as your next step into doing it. Because I think Traueri is just a ton of potential.

Just so much, you know, on the white side, it can be very mineral-driven, very terroir-specific. This is a beautiful sort of like hybrid. Is it red? Is it rosé? That's fun to, you know, kind of bring people along. So there's just, you know, it's exactly like Gurria. You're going to drink them lively with food. I'll drink a lot of them, you know, sing songs, dance. It's a place where your life is, even though it's sometimes difficult, it's always fun. Do you have a favorite, like, proverb about Gurrian people? There's a great little cartoon that was this. So the Soviets did some what they call multi-films, which was like their kind of their cartoons. And the reason why I love it is that there's a character that's played, like, called Tsitsila in Georgian now.

It's a little chicken. And it's based on a Gurrian person, basically. There's a lazy kind of Eastern Georgian who's drinking and eating and building slowly. Of course, it's supposed to be Soviet propaganda. But it's called The Magic Egg. And out of pops this magic egg is this kind of hop, hop, kind of jumping around little chicken who's, like, driving these Eastern Georgians insane about making them do all this work. And that's the perfect picture of the Gurrians. The Gurrians are like, hop, hop, hop. Let's get things done. We're moving fast. We're singing fast. We're doing like this. You know, you go over there. You go over there. And the Eastern Georgians are slower and calm and say, 'Wait a second. We need to drink now.' You know, like, let's put one brick on top of the other.

And let's look back and see how it goes. And they're like, 'No, let's just throw it on.' So that's the best way that I can sort of, like, capture the Gurrian nature is that it's fast. It's always, you know, very freedom loving. That's their first toast in Gurria. They always drink to freedom first. They don't drink to victory first or to God first. Typically they drink to freedom. So I don't know if that captures it. But they're a fun place. It's a fun bunch. You're testing the limits of my knowledge of regionally derived Georgian Soviet-era propaganda. That's just one more thread to pull. Yeah, I know. That's amazing. Zoe, do you have any questions for Mr. Barakat? Yeah, ton of great questions.

I'm going to start with perhaps jumping into Chuck Berry, which listeners at home, we're now just going to call this great Chuck Berry. For the foreseeable future. But could you explain a little bit more about that skin contact? It is really interesting to see on the same bottle, you know, Chuck Berry as an amber wine, but then to see it as more of a rosé. But it's still such light in color for being, what, 30 bees on the skins? And I was wondering if you could explain a little bit more about that. Yeah. So, again, it's the phenolics pigment in all of these things, with the exception of about 12 different Vinifera grapes, which are called Tenturiere, which is Saparavi, which we're not going to talk about today. We're not trying today.

There's one, a very famous one in Georgia. But all of the pigment is coming from the skin. So if your skins don't have a lot of phenolics, your skins don't have a lot of pigmentation, then your resulting juice isn't going to, you know, the solution, which is the alcoholic solution, as it's doing fermentation, isn't going to extract as much pigment and tannin and phenolics characteristic from it. And obviously that solution changes as your alcohol level changes and as your temperature changes, the extraction all changes. So typically you would think that you would see more, but that's just because it's, I've been told the term is a gris grape in the sense that, like, Pinot Grigio, Pinot Gris, you can have in the northern part where you do, of Slovenia, where you're doing skin contact Pinot Grigio, right?

It comes out pink because the Pinot Grigio is that kind of burnt orange-pinkish color, as well. And so it's similar to that; it doesn't have a ton of pigment built in to the actual grape itself. And so that's why you're not going to see that. You're not getting a deep extraction of color. And the amber, again, properly called amber in Georgia because it isn't, we would really call it a white wine. You know, all you're doing is you're crushing, but because the crushing isn't very soft, it's not going through the crusher. It's getting a very small hint of extraction as it flows through the skins, which makes it not a bright white or, you know, a clear, clear white. It makes it sort of a golden color.

And so that's why the amber is there. And then you can do something like 10 days of skin contact. And also the distinction, too, is that you could get a lighter, even on this wine, you could get a lighter color, too, depending on how you press off from the skins. So a lot of the pigment that comes even on this 30 days comes at the very end when you're basket pressing it off, you know, off of the skins. And if you didn't basket press to get as much juice out, you'd get even less pigment. So in general, it's, this is, you know, you have to try hard to get as dark as some of them. This isn't the darkest one. You know, Omli has a little bit darker this year.

And then there's another guy named Bibi Nish, really, who comes from Ajara, who has a little bit darker as well. But in general, this is about as dark as it gets. And somebody's asking what basket pressing is. Basket, it's a, you make what's called a basket, slats of boards. You pour the juice through it. It collects at the bottom. And then you can have a press. A thing that you twist down to press the juice out of the skins. And you can decide how much pressure to press on it. And, of course, that's a basket press. You can do a balloon press. There's all different kinds of ways. How do you get the juice off of the skins? And it should be said that basket press is very traditional in champagne, for instance.

And the juice emerges from between the slats as the press itself, which is essentially a screw, works its way down. There is also, in traditional Georgian winemaking, the sats na keli. So we talked about cabevri. And we'll talk about those in the context of the rest of these wines because they are made in a traditional style. And I think it's important to unwrap what that means. But traditionally, these grapes would be stomped by foot in one of these. Kick it, Noel. What do we see? Well, so, yeah, this is called sats na keli in Eastern. But in the western part of Georgia, in our second episode, where we're going to, it actually has a different name. A much easier name to pronounce, which is called Horgo. We didn't get in this for easy pronunciation.

That's right. But I mean, I just, even myself, as a person who speaks Georgian, has trouble with the first one. So I like to go with Horgo. So we can go with Horgo from now on. The idea is that, yeah, in the eastern part of Georgia, they would be made out of stone, actually. But in the western part of Georgia, where there is not as much stone deposits, the deposits of the mountains and things like this are not big stones. They tend to be more of soft stones, like limestone, what we're going to get in Racha. They were typically made out of trees. So large, hollowed-out trees. And so the process that we're going to next in Racha, which is a higher elevation area, it's hard to believe this tree, these guys in this region, almost all of them are fermenting in these hollowed-out vessels.

They're foot-stomping. Now, they used to be foot-stomping. But a lot of people now are doing a regular kind of stomping. They have a rotating press, which just crushes and de-stems. And that's a pneumatic press. So there you have essentially a cylinder on end and a bladder inside the cylinder that pushes the grapes against the edge of the vessel. And that slowly reaches out the fuselage. Right, exactly. And so there's different kinds of crushers and different kinds of presses. But in general, they're doing it still into this large hollowed-out tree. And this family, the Carouselides, which we feature in the second episode and which is the wine we're trying now, it's hard to believe. Most people don't know hazelnut trees. I don't know. I haven't really seen them in the U.S.

But hazelnut trees are big in western Georgia because they're used for hazelnut production. The majority of your Nutella that you eat, guess where the hazelnuts are coming from? They're actually coming from Georgia. And there's a whole mafia story about this, why it's bad. It could be a whole other thing. But the idea is that hazelnut trees are – to cultivate hazelnuts, you actually just want long – thin, newly-grown stalks. They kind of grow like a bush. And these guys have a 200-year-old one that they've used continuously in their family that's made from a hollowed-out hazelnut tree, which is unbelievable because the size that it is – it's cut in half. The size that it is, it would have to take five grown men to reach around it.

And I've just never, ever seen – they don't exist anymore. Like, we talk about legends of old trees. Those trees don't exist in Georgia anymore. A hazelnut tree that was left to grow once. It's wild to be this size. And so these massive forests that are up in Racha. And so they're – yeah, they're doing the winemaking process in there. And why do they do it in there? They do it because, yes, they're harvesting much later. Because they're higher elevation, they're harvesting much later. Their sugar levels are ripening up later. And so they are doing it in the – above the ground because actually they can control the temperature of the room. It was one of the earliest ideas of sort of temperature control, is that you could heat up that space so that the fermentation could actually get started.

Sometimes if you buried it underneath the ground, the temperature had already changed. And it was just below where fermentation would start. And so that is, you know, traditionally done in this region and traditionally done here. But that being said, this particular wine sees zero skin contact. This is a Racha Tetra. And it is a variety that was quite literally almost extinct. I mean, there's five or six really people who are growing this wine right now. But as I say in the film, and I just really truly believe, is that Racha is way behind. But they have – they're the definition of terroir. I mean, they have black forest soils on – from a forest, from this ancient forest, on top of just limestone deposits, just like white chalky limestone.

I mean, some of the most famous regions, you know, see that. And what's perfect for those are some white grapes. But, you know, typically the white grapes are – white grapes are being either lost through kind of just people leaving the region. But also the wine industry there is focused a lot on red grapes, two red grapes, which are fantastic. But they're focused on them that were – two red grapes that were used for semi-sweet production in the Russian – for the Russian market. Again, those wines can be great and lovely. It's just that they shouldn't come at the cost of really great varieties that could do, you know, magical things, I think, in this particular terroir. So this is the Racha Tetra. Racha Tetra, which simply means the white grape from Racha.

Really complex name. Yeah, they went out on a limb there. You know, I think, you know, a lot of the wine that got exported to the Soviet Union, you know, the – you know, your Soviet grandmother was drinking, you know, likely a semi-sweet red. And that style was really, you know, developed in Racha. And – or at least the most kind of famous exemplar of that style developed in Racha. And, you know, I've heard it was, you know, part of the reason was that it was just too cold to finish fermentation. And so, you know, you get these stock ferments and, you know, the wines developed this, you know, reputation outside the region that's continued to today, which is kind of, you know, fascinating because it's a small and remote corner of Georgia.

It's kind of hard to get a sense of, but, you know, for the sake of the map, but it is, you know, essentially isolated by mountains from, you know, the rest of the country. And, you know, harvest happens incredibly late there. You know, they get abundant sunshine and they can successfully ripen grapes, vintage in and vintage out. But it's a late harvest and the wines have this, you know, incredible freshness about them as well, which I hopefully you get a sense of for the sake of the Tetra. I do want to talk a bit about Kvevri, though. So you referenced, you know, the fact that, you know, fermentation for this wine happens, you know, for some of these wines historically happened above ground.

But, you know, the, you know, kind of traditional Georgian wine style is aged in these clay vessels called Kvevri, which comes from a Georgian word, you know, or a term that means that which is buried in the earth, essentially, which, as you said, was, you know, kind of a different form of ancient temperature control. And these vessels have different names and kind of subtly different shapes depending on where you go in Georgia. But, you know, I think they have some spiritual significance to, you know, wine being aged and developed in the womb of the earth. And, you know, there are a lot of forward-thinking Georgian winemakers working in different styles. But, you know, are all of these wines that we're drinking today, Noel, raised in Kvevri? They're not.

So the only, well, the only one that isn't is this wine that we're drinking right now. And that's, again, out of necessity, a great example about Racha is that these guys aren't making it in Kvevri. Why? Because their Kvevri's are broken. And, you know, and this is a small family operation. I mean, we, I think we had to maybe underscore the scale of these first two operations that we're talking about. Dato makes, you know, of that Traveri Rose that you had, this is his largest vintage. And it's, he made a thousand bottles of that wine. And that's after 10 years of basically investment in that. This is a Racha Litetra. 300 bottles imported. 400 bottles made. So these are people who want to make wine in Kvevri.

But, you know, really, and I joke, this wine has no business being imported to the U.S. Anywhere else, it's just like it would never make it here. But it's through a story of friendship and just honest desire to help each other develop. I kind of look at it as a development project. That's why these wines are here. So he has Kvevri's in the ground, but they're broken. And then they're in the middle of his cellar. So in order to get new ones, you'd have to dig those ones out and plant them in. And so out of necessity, really, they just ferment, they finish, they store in stainless steel after, you know. And so that's where it is. Which I think is very interesting. It's not like any knock against them.

But everybody else is made in Kvevri. And of different sizes. Yeah, I think, you know, that point about the scale of production here is really significant. You know. I think people are more and more concerned about, you know, buying and, you know, what they buy and who they buy from. And, you know, that being a conscious decision and being more mindful of how, you know, the invisible hand, you know, exerts influence on, you know, the broader market and, you know, the wine industry in this case. And, you know, for each of these bottles, you're supporting individual arsons. And, you know, most of these producers, they don't start off with an idea of being a professional wine producer. It's a passion project that, you know, can only evolve into something more significant if, you know, they find an international market for these wines.

And people like Noel to champion them. And, you know, the mere act of buying them, you know, supports that work in a really, you know, I think poetic and pure, you know, kind of way. Which is a great segue into Viya's Wine. Zoe, I promise we'll get to questions after this. I love, love, love the Avalitze family. Thank you. This is a wine made in Cabernet Sauvignon. It has a really lovely, modern, Jetsons-era throwback label situation. Viya Avalitzes is a force of nature behind this wine. She, you know, has these grandiose visions of, you know, not only, you know, creating a thriving business for herself, for Sister Gravansa, and their brother. But equally, you know, kind of making agriculture, making winemaking and grape growing a viable industry in, you know, this corner of Georgia where that hasn't been possible until recently.

And inspiring people in the younger generation to, you know, champion winemaking. And they are incredibly special people. Gravansa had her own star turn. To the extent that, you know, a podcast that, you know, has a limited amount of viewers can engender a star turn. But she's unforgettable. Her sister is, her sister Viya is a little more cerebral. You know, Gravansa is just kind of this, you know, ebullient force of nature. But Viya makes all the wines from white grapes. Gravansa makes all the wines from red grapes. And their brother, he went to viticulture school, did he not? Yeah. Yeah, he just, he's the most advanced in terms now of sort of like technical winemaking knowledge. Yeah. But they are, you know, devoted to this project and devoted to each other in a really inspiring kind of way.

What are we drinking, Noel? We're drinking the Tsitska Tsolik Aori. I'll say that again. Tsitska is, and Tsolik Aori. So Tsolik Aori, I like to tell my little story because it makes me say it about 10 times. And then people start to feel comfortable is that most grape varieties, as you understand, do mean something. Tsitska is one of the exceptions. Tsitska does not mean anything. But Tsolik Aori comes from the word tsoli. Tsoli means wife. Tsoliko, the eco at the end means like a diminutive, like my wifey, you could say. My little wife, little wife. Yeah. And then Tsolik Aori, the suffix at the end means from. So a real rough and not true translation, but fun. So you could translate Tsolik Aori as my wifey's wine.

But authentically, it would be my in-law's wine. So it's the kind of wine that came from my wife's family. Is it like a dowry situation here? It's just that like when you're at Supra and you're at feasting and somebody's like, oh, my gosh, this wine is really great. Where does it come from? Oh, it's Tsolik Aori. It's the wines from my family. I've inherited it through my wife. It's the wine that came from that side. And that's a great segue into like how Baia's wine got called Baia's wine. Is that, you know, a lot of what I was talking about. And you talked about here, too, is that it's, you know, is that Baia grew up in vineyards. Literally, her house is surrounded by vineyards. Her grandfather is a professional winemaker.

She always does harvest, everything else. But like this is just the kind of soil that I like to say that Georgians are growing up with. And particularly in Amaretti, there's still infrastructure there, still grape growing, still grape selling and things that are happening. But she doesn't think it's possible at that age, you know, up until a certain time. She just doesn't think it's possible for her to be the one who's doing it. Right. She just isn't necessarily allowed necessarily to do that. She goes to the capital, starts studying international relations, all the great stuff that, you know. I think in spite of the fact that, you know, the Georgians celebrate, you know, I mean, the greatest folk hero is, you know, King Tamar. But, you know, this is still a patriarchal culture.

Absolutely. And that's and this is about it's definitely a patriarchal culture. But the idea is that they do have a respect for women that allows it. But I think at the same time for her to, you know, if so is to say that there's that ripeness there. It's not like so patriarchal where like they don't respect them at all. It's not so it's not so open where you can really do anything. It's just this generation who's sort of discovering that she goes to these festivals, you know, sort of natural wine boom is happening. She's like, well, we've got wine. She's going to go there, stand on the table, pour the wine. All of these famous winemakers who hadn't really tried much Solico or even at that time because Amaretti was still blocked off.

Come try this wine. They're all going around talking to each other. Like, you got to take this wine. You got to taste this wine. They're like, whose wine is it? They're like, it's Baia's wine. It's Baia's wine. And that's when she discovered, oh, I I'm it's my wine. I'm allowed to, you know, to be the one up front. I'm allowed to be the take it to the next step. She literally applies for a grant the next year, like three thousand dollars. I mean, nothing comes up with the labels. You know, not these labels, but older labels and gets bottles and bottles it. And, you know, she says, this is my wine. And she gets involved. It's a start. And then she convinces her sister to come. She comes back from Sweden.

A great story as well. I mean, just a lot of immigration that's happening from Georgia to say, hey, and now they're all doing what they've always were doing. But now it's their chance, their time to do it. And these are the great examples of people that grew up with us. I mean, we met Kwanzaa. We have been watching from afar, tasting the wines, met her when she came to D.C., actually tasted her red wines. And that's when I really said yes, because making the red varieties that they have is very difficult. And and we grew together from three thousand bottles to fifteen thousand bottles. And basically what we were able to do is to devote, say that, hey, we're going to buy half of your stock every year. You got us.

No matter what happens, we're going to buy it because we have people like Bill and then we have customers like you who understand that it's much more than just wine. And that's now allowing them, as you'll see in the documentary, to think, well, we're going to stay and live here for the rest of our lives. We're going to build three. We're going to have OK, we have one family house. We're going to be three houses. We're going to not have just two hectares of grapes. We're going to have 20 hectares of grapes and we have a 20-year plan. And that's the kind of love that I love about their their family. So this is really kind of is a very authentic Emirati wine.

It's a two, very crisp and acidic grapes, very mineral-driven grapes that are married together in a 70-30 percent relationship. It has 30 percent of the skins. Only 30 percent of the skins are aged, are macerated or aged on this wine during fermentation and then for three months in total. So we call this we like to call it. People have tried orange wine. People tried amber wine. Obviously, with Bill, he tried. You tried. Plenty of those with him. We like to show people that this is a spectrum. This is where amber wine begins. You can still get that tan and you can get the phenolics, but it's not that lovely sort of amber color. It's your understanding. Just the beginning of what skin contact does. And I think it does it really beautifully.

Yeah, I love that point. No. You know, for me, if Georgia was just Kiketi, you know, it would be really interesting. And, you know, you know, stupidly beautiful, but it would be a little more, you know, Southern Mediterranean and, you know, kind of monolithic. You know, for me, Imereti is that other pole. You know, it is that node. And, you know, historically, you know, there were there were, you know, Georgia devolved into these three kingdoms, Imereti, Kiketi and Kiketi. And Kiketi has a strong, you know, its own history of winemaking. But Imereti on one hand and Kiketi on the other are the stylistically kind of kind of the poles. And and Imereti is one of my favorite regions anywhere. It's amazingly, you know, remarkable diversity even within Imereti itself.

And, you know, as Noel said, you know, the winemaking infrastructure there survived, you know, intact in some form. And it didn't outside of Kiketi. Now, it's very unique within Georgia. You know, maybe in Racha a little bit because they have this like really successful product. But like and, you know, I think the wines that I love the most from Georgia are Havoc. You know, have been some of these Imeretians and I just see such potential on there for future growth as well. And I think it's a really special place. You know, people get hooked on the idea of Georgian orange wine and, you know, these clay vessels and it's in the earth. And, you know, all this like kind of, you know, just like fun, you know, kind of sexy things are easy to sell for a hipster some.

But then, you know, at the end of the day, something. You know, it should be elegant. It should be, you know, immensely drinkable, you know, in a way that, you know, is, you know, kind of self-sustaining over a longer period of time. And that's what Imeretian wine does for me; it exists. You know, you could detach a label from this. You could just, you know, detach any narrative from it, even though it has one of the most compelling narratives I could think of personally, historically. And I had this tremendous personal attachment to it. You could just serve this wine to somebody. And I think they would have a sense of it. Specialness. And I, I adore that. Zoe, what do you have for us for the sake of questions?

Well, can we talk a little bit about the wax seal? And I know that. Go straight through, everyone. Go straight through. Don't chip away at the wax. Just go straight through. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The wax seal is. Yeah. Every wax is different. It's in vogue in the natural wine community. It's definitely in vogue. It's definitely in vogue in Georgia. And it's, it's nicer than the sort of plastic thing. Yeah. The two things, if you want to, if you don't have any time, just go right through it. It's with a, with a wine key, it usually will crack off on the sides. There are some terrible ones that won't. But the other option too is to, if you have some time, cool it down as much as you can.

That's another thing too, is that if you sometimes put it in ice water, just the cap for, I don't know, 30, 40 seconds, you can sometimes even crack it off as a whole piece. So that's another thing that I've. That's a good, that's a good life hack, Noel. Some of the really old school wax, like don't, do not do this at home. You can actually melt. I do not do, again, do not try this at home. This wax doesn't operate that way, but. This is the new fancy ones. It has a little bit more, it has, it's designed ideally for you to go right through. It has a little bit more rubberiness to it. So it should be able to just break right off.

I was going to ask if there's like a tradition of having wax, but in terms of even bottles being such a new commodity or a new material used in wine, as opposed to could every, or just like large, large vessels of that nature, then. Well, it should be said solely from the natural wine movement. It should be said that like beekeeping is very, you know, significant as a hobby, not only hobby, but you know, this, this notion that Noel spoke to. I feel like I'm mansplaining Georgia. I'm sorry. I love it. I love it. I'm sorry. Sorry. My favorite thing is to listen to other people. At any rate. You know, I think Noel spoke to this notion of permaculture and this notion of this like idealic, you know, self-sustaining farm.

And there's a huge industry beekeeping and, and, you know you know, it's a big part of agriculture. You know, these are, are, you know, vital. And so there's a lot of that. There's a lot of that in Georgia. And because every themselves are typically they're, they're. I'm not fired at a sufficiently high temperature to be watertight. So they are traditionally lined with propolis or, or, or essentially B B resin beeswax president. And, and so, you know, that wax is a huge part of, you know, the, you know, a la vaish in and of itself. So it does feel somewhat poetic. That it ends up on top. On top of the bottle. Does the wax impact air transfer and aging? Turn turns out. No, that was originally the idea. Great question. Yeah.

I mean, I think the, I think the latest science is that it doesn't as much as people hope that it would. So it was done. It's not a tradition that started in George, not a tradition that started in natural wine. It is. It's, you know, these, what we have on these bottles now, this is a modern invention, which you could heat gun them on. So wax was just an extra, what was thought to be an extra incentive to, to guard against the drying out of natural cork. What I have read is that it's questionable whether it does anything. Mostly what it is for now, you've had better advancements in cork rather than you've had with wax. So mostly now it's an aesthetic thing, but some people could still debate about that.

That's my; you may know more than that, but that's what I know. That's a; I haven't done much research on that line of closure. What else you got to this fourth voice that you spoke about with the singing in Gloria, is that similar to the singing style in Tuva? It is. It is. As far as I know, no, it isn't so Georgia has, again, we're always talking about ancient things and that sometimes it can sound like a broken record. And I definitely remember being that guy in 2007, meeting this lovely girl with an accent, telling me all of these things about how all this, you know, this is the birthplace of wine. And this is where Jason, the Argonauts were, and this is where the oldest polyphonic singing is, and the oldest manuscripts of Christianity.

And I go back and I'm like, you're lying. And then I go home and Google it and I'm like, oh man, I'm that guy, shoot. So the idea is that no Georgian polyphony isn't related. You know, in, in Orthodox Christianity, there's tons of polyphony. But this is a, there was a folk tradition that predates Christianity. And, and so there's Christian folk music and then there's actual folk music. And, and so this voice is, yeah, it's, it's a really interesting, it's kind of a cross between yodeling and, and other Georgian voices. And, it, the name of it in Georgian is, is also an onomatopoeia of just the sound that they make, which is like, yo. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, and so, yeah, I mean, literally just go, like, you can Google Georgian voices.

That's a great ensemble. And, but again, there's, there's very distinct regional differences. I mean, you'll hear right away. We'll get to work on a Spotify playlist. That's right. Very good. For everyone. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to need to circle back about the Nutella mafia. It is not a waste of time. It is very much relevant and you have all of it. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds like a Netflix development deal. That sounds like a, that's like an eight-episode arc waiting to happen somewhere. I mean, they're just throwing, no, they're just throwing money around, man. That's right. That's right. I know. I got it. I got to get the better distribution, you know. We've already established that there's a film industry. If South Korea can give us, you know, a, you know, a nine-episode horror arc that becomes the number one show.

There's no reason that the Nutella mafia cannot, you know, be trending, you know, in 2022, man. Yeah. Yeah. I hope it's not as banal as it sounds. I'm sure it's more, more exciting. It's going to be amazing. It's going to be amazing. Yeah. Yeah. I want to, let's touch on the last one and then we'll, we'll answer all the questions. You know, it wasn't intentional for the sake of this exercise to sidestep Kekete, you know, we are in true, you know, tail of goat, you know, revelers, our fashion, you know, really diving into the. You know, the, the other, you know, kind of 25%, you know, even, you know, in so far as, as Georgia itself is, is a, you know, for most wine drinkers, a relatively obscure, you know, corner of the world.

Within Georgia, it should be stated, you know, Kekete, it is the green region for the city east. Noel will be visiting, really, Gogi, Dr. Feely, who's really kind of the founder of the He's kind of one of the most important modern winemakers in the entire country and makes wine in a bunch of different labels along with his son and does it beautifully. You know, you're turning out in Kekete about to this day, three quarters of the country's wine. You know, that cannot be overstated. And the Kekete style, especially for the amber wines, is extended skin contact, six months. You know, the Ron Popeil, set it and forget it, you know, seal it off, open it up next spring when you have a good occasion, you know, winemaking methodology and the wines are full-bodied, but in a kind of dried apricot, you know, kind of way and and textural.

And, you know, that comes from, you know, accumulation of glycerol, but then they have this like, wild raging acid and like, you know, perverse tannic structure that calls the mind red wine. And they're great, and they're age-worthy, and they're amazing. And that is a Georgian wine that most people think of. We are really kind of coloring outside the lines for the sake of these regions, for the sake of these other regions. But, you know, that's important to me for the sake of, you know, this endeavor, because there's so much more to Georgia than, you know, the 75%. And I think, you know, that 25% is just really compelling. And, you know, if there's only the 75%, it'd be great. But, you know, the rest of it is what really makes the place, you know, so, so special.

So, this next one is from Cartley. That is, I don't know, what do we call the color for Cartley? Yeah, I don't know. I think it's millennial pink? No. No, it's unfortunate. I feel like, I feel like they got the short straw for the sake of the map, the map color, color scheme here. But it is the central region that encompasses the modern capital of Tbilisi. As a winemaking region, what is Cartley like, Noel? Well, the funny thing is that you can, as you leave that there for a second, I mean, okay, it looks like a unified region, maybe. But it's, if you get into Georgia, you realize that there's so many different terroirs that are happening inside of this, that big thing.

And you can kind of see that natural break where there's that skinny thing in between just north of Tbilisi and then that southern part. So, there's what's called Shida Cartley and Cuemo Cartley, which means inside Cartley. So, this one on the, this is Caspi, Khashuri, that's called the inner, inner Cartley. And then there's Cuemo Cartley, which is what's south of Tbilisi, the capital. And these are drastically different terroirs, but they're all locked together in a region for, for good reason, sort of historically. But that's what I just would say is to say that Cartley in general, it's not as humid. So, what the main thing that's important to understand is that you see this little thin strip of gray or beige that separates Cartley and Emirati in the middle.

That's a mountain range that cuts the country in half. And that's an important mountain range because it cuts off all the humid and hot sea influence. Cuts it off in half. And so, Cartley has the benefit of being surrounded by that mountain range on the, on the east, on the west, and then on the east between Kakheti and in Cartley you have the Gombori Range, which it cuts it off as well. And so, it's a very continental climate, which is just code word for mild. So, you're not getting super cold. You're not getting super, super hot. So, it's a great place for grapevines because you don't have to be too cold hardy, you know, and you don't have to be too heat resistant and you don't need a lot of watering.

That being said, it's like Goldilocksie. Yeah, Goldilocksie. Exactly right. That's perfect. And so, it's; but that's changing a little bit with global warming. There's places there needing to water now that they've never had to water before, like everywhere else. But in general, it's a, it's a moderate climate with large valleys. It should be growing tons of wine. I mean, easily could be 25% of Georgia's production itself. But it is classic Soviet story that we've been telling about it. Soviets were a planned economy. So, they just said, you don't grow grapes here anymore. You grow fruit trees. And so, they were doing fruit tree production for and fruit production for the Soviet Union. And so, and then when the Soviet Union fell apart, you just didn't have infrastructure to start.

You know, you didn't have vineyards that are already planted. You didn't have things like that. So, the place that we're focusing on is in the central part of, of Kartli, which is that left one from Tbilisi. It's called, it comes, wine grapes are coming from this place called Mukhrani. But the winery itself is in a place called Saguramo. And so, again, beautiful, lovely, sort of epic mountain views as well. Similar to Kakheti in that respect. But a little bit farther from the mountains. And so, even a little bit more continental. You're never going to get to the hottest places in the South there, which is a place called Bolnisi. But in general, very moderate temperatures. With distinct grapevines. But, again, very underrepresented. Ah, yes, there it is. See, you see those big farmable valleys.

I mean, you could easily imagine all of those being planted with vineyards. But as you see, great, great example. There, in this picture, there are two vineyards in there. All the rest of this land is not planted as vineyards. So, that's a great example of, yeah, you could, all of those could easily be planted as vineyards. All that is sustainable terroir for vineyards. But a lot of it's grown just vegetables. And random kinds of things as well. And so, it's something that we would love to see in the next, you know, 20 to 25 years. Where we have those plots being planted with vineyards. Because it's just really lovely terroir. What do you like about this particular offering? So, we're drinking Gogi Tebzadzi's Shabkapito, which is one of my favorite Georgian varietals, to say, Shabkapito.

And it doesn't lend itself to, you know, bad puns like Chuck Berry does. But Shabkapito almost has like its own internal rhyme scheme in a really fun way. I should say that I really adore, and it equally speaks to the two schools of Georgian winery naming for the sake of Westerners. You either chop off the Adze or Ashvili on your name. Or you, you know, just go after the village name. Like those are the options. You have to make it easier to say. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. If you're a Westerner, like John Wordman, you, you know, take on the local, you know, kind of folk wisdom. And you need to talk pheasant steers. But, you know, if you're local, you either chop or you, you know, go with, you know, an approximate location.

I love his wines. They, for me, they feel very soulful. And feeling like, you know, they evoke this, you know, what we consider kind of more traditional Georgian winemaking mythology. While feeling very sophisticated. And, and for me, this, this wine in particular, you know, it's, it's more savory, you know, than your average, you know, you know, West Coast Pinot. But I think it has some of that, you know, Pinot Noir juice too. You know, it has some of that, you know, charm. And I really dig it. What do you like about this particular grape? And, and what Gogi, Gogi himself is? Yeah. I mean, I, I like, I do. I mean, the joke is that the Georgians are always searching for the, the infamous Georgian Pinot Noir.

And that's just because they, they've heard that Pinot Noir sells well, probably, you know. And I like Pinot Noir just fine too. But if you were going to get to close to sort of Pinot Noir kind-of-esque things, there are, there's plenty to overlap with Chave Capito, I do think. I, I like, in a real quiet frankness, I just love that it's not Saporavi. Even though I love Saporavi to death. It's just, I think it's really important for us to be showing this, this variety. There's not a ton, again, very under-planted, classically under-planted. Every year he's having harder and harder times getting grapes from his growers that he works with, these three growers, because the demand is becoming so high and people have not invested yet enough.

Or the investments of planting vineyards haven't, haven't borne fruit yet. And so I love that. I love that it's got that medium plus-ness to it. You know, you're going to get, instead of all this sort of dark brambly fruits always that you're going to get there, it's a little bit more plummy, you know, you're going to get there as well. And that earthiness that's going there too. So it's, what I, I feel like it's a red wine. Often Saporavi can be very heavy and tannic and, you know, demanding of food. I love the, the way that the Chave Capito can play in between, you know. And so you can get, you can do a lot with it and you can play, you know, drink it by itself.

But also like, I also am enjoying the experience of him discovering the, the field. You know, for me, this is a very insider thing. You know, every vintage that he's been doing is a little bit different. And that is really exciting to me to be making, meeting winemakers who are kind of honing their vision for a grape too. So like the first year of the 2018, more, much more stewy, much more oxidative kind of characters. This one that's toned back a little bit. And so he's playing around with macerations and different things like that. And so it's really fun to be involved with somebody who's, who's alive, you know, in the winemaking process and sort of discovering all of this. And which is anybody who comes and tells you here is like, this is a classic Chave Capito.

You just put them to the side because there are people don't know what that is. They're inventing. They're making it up as they go along. Exactly. And I'd rather know that they're making it up and going along and being involved in that conversation. I mean, there's something, there's something exciting about that too. You know, people, there's something very exciting about being on the ground and, and, you know, as things are, are, are, you know, kind of being born and, you know, you know, the, the word is out about Burgundy. You know, I can't hang out with, you know, the, you know, 13th, 14th century monks that were, you know, making that happen. You know, but I can hang out with, you know, Georgians as they rediscover 8,000 years of history and kind of reinvent what that means to them.

And, and there's something really exhilarating about that. I'm struck by how herbal. Yeah. This wine is, I mean, I named it Rapinoe, but for me, it almost registered more like summer symphony or, or, you know, it has that like, you know, cab bronc, you know, kind of, you know, kind of gravelly, like crushed Bailey thing happening, which, which I always adore. And, and, you know, super exciting for the sake of this wine. Yeah. I mean, and the, you know, the, the label as it's there, I mean, sometimes I always have it, you know, you read it down like this Tevze, Tevze means fish, Tevze means fish and Tevzadze means fisherman's son. Yeah. And that's where that comes from.

And yeah, we try to say on the bottle, those kinds of five words that maybe give you a sense of who Goga is and what, what, what it's about. He seems, I want to, I want to imagine that he's kind of like a little reverent and like, he has a good sense of humor. He does have a good sense of humor. I mean, he's, he tries to like all good Georgians, he's, he's trying to balance it all. You know what I mean? And, and I, and I think that like, he's not, he wants his wines to sort of be that little bit reverent. You know, that sort of rebellious place that he doesn't necessarily always have, you know, allowed to be otherwise.

And his background is, you know, he was a professional trained winemaker who left the business because he didn't like the commercialization of what was happening in the wine in the early 2000s before this whole movement. And he's a guy that we knew for a long time, makes amazing fruit brandies, which we haven't brought into the US yet. But he was doing this distillation process. And so in that kind of friendship that we had, we were always pushing him to get back into wine, get back into wine. You know, you're in Cartley, there's nobody else besides Iago. We need to have Cartley wines. And so it's that kind of, you know, newness. And it's just, again, small, small production. I mean, he has six quaveres.

You know, he bought this particular wine; the smallest production as I talked about because of grape availability. So he, like in 2020, he made six vintages. He made 300 bottles. You know, 2019, he made 600 bottles. So it's again a really cool way to be involved in a conversation about a revitalization of a region that you know there's only going to be 600 of people who are at best who are going to be involved in it. It should be said too like you know people talk production you know and 300 cases would be minuscule. 300 bottles is like you know that's absurd. It's absurd. It's like a fashion project for somebody. Absolutely. Yeah. That's not, that's like not commercial at that point. No. And this is, yeah, these guys are not making a living off of winemaking.

That's an important thing to say is that they would like to. They'd like to develop that place. And Bayer is a place, a great example. They started with 3,000 bottles. There are 15,000 bottles. They're going, they're going to reach 20,000 bottles probably in the next, they, again, they bought four more hectares of wine so that they could really double their production in two more years. I did love that episode. You followed. The family through their new vineyard. And I thought that was, I mean, as they were, you know, they were treating the young vines. And, you know, there's something like really poetic about that for the sake of, you know, the hope, you know, that, you know, you know, there's a slow return of investment on, on bonds.

You know, it was an act of faith. You know, you're not going to, you know, get fruit for viable wine until the third or fourth leaf. And, you know, even then you're not going to get the wine you want until. You know, maybe a decade later. So. Yeah. Yeah. It can't be overstated that, you know, when you purchase something like this, you know, you become a part of that all. And I think that's really amazing. And I hope that's what the films can do for you all is just to give you a sense, put a face to it, you know, be, you know, charmed by those people to understand that, that that's what we're about. And that's what we can be about. When we drink wine.

Is that we can be about getting to know people having forming a community, even if it's global. This is the best version of globalism. If there is one, it would be something like that. And I think that, you know, that's the goal is to show you a little bit of those faces and little, you know, these people are very popular on Instagram and other things. A lot of people know them, but they don't realize that, you know, you could easily take all of the money that they get back here, which is a fairly significant amount of money now for the region that they live in. And buy some fancy cars and do other things. But when you go and visit them, what they want to show you is this new tractor that they bought with the money that they got from America.

And this new vineyard that they're, you know, trying out these new organic farming processes with. And like when you get to see that and meet people like that, it's like, how could you not be hopeful for the future of Georgia when people are really seeing what's important and valuable and investing their life in it? You know, that's just inspiring. Walmart shows. Walmart shows. Walmart shows. Yeah, Walmart shows. And cheers to you all joining us at home alone together. It was such a pleasure. I want to get your questions, Zoe, but, you know, I just equally want to say that, you know, Noel spoke to this idea of threads, you know, and pulling out those for the sake of Georgia because, you know, it's such an ancient place.

And, you know, for a small area, it is at the center of the origin of so many cultures. It's so many things. And I will equally say that, you know, I think that way about wine, too. You know, there's so many threads to wine and there's so many ways to engage it and get into it. And, you know, that said, though, it's not always the healthiest way to earn a living. It's not always the most, not the easiest way to earn a living. And, you know, you know, as Noel said, you know, if you're, you know, Instagram famous. People assume that. You know, the, the, the, you know, kind of economic windfall follows suit. But, you know, that doesn't happen in wine. You know, there's a great old expression.

If you want to, you know, make a small fortune in wine, invest a great fortune. I will say, though, you know, Noel, you are one of those people that redeems my faith in wine as a calling. And, you know, I'm so honored to to know you and, you know, consider you a, you know, discussion. And, you know, that's kind of a comrade in arms for the sake of all this stuff. Absolutely, man. Yeah. Thank you for joining us. It's lovely that we find each other. Yeah, yeah. In a community. All right. So what do you got? I was serious about the hazelnut. Okay. All right. I'll see you in a minute. I mean, just to be real quick is that, yeah, I mean, this is my sort of economic development plan and all sorts of stuff for Guria.

What happened in Guria is, again, it's perfect for growing hazelnuts. Always they were growing hazelnuts, but then it came in that some people basically were able to create a pipeline for hazelnuts to go into Turkey. So Turkey is the way that European economies works is that the European market is the most just like the American market. It's the most wealthy. They like finished products. They moved their manufacturing out. They moved a lot of manufacturing out of that, with Germany being the exception. And a lot of that manufacturing moved to Turkey. And that happened over the last 30, 40 years. And in general, in Turkey's processing, what happens is that Turkey also can grow hazelnuts, but not on such a scale.

They have the techniques to manufacture the hazelnuts into different kinds of products that are then used in different people who are doing. So Georgia is basically the peasantry that grows the hazelnuts. And they were happy to do it because, again, they had nothing in the 90s. They replanted. The problem why I have a problem with it in general is that it's a one-year harvest crop. So you get all of your money at one time of the year. And again, as everybody knows about money, it's very difficult, especially if you're not used to a new capitalistic society, how to spend wisely when you get just paid once a year. And so it engenders a kind of thing of where it's very little work to take care of the trees.

You have to do basically kind of two things. And then they'll produce, depending on the year. Right? The problem is that the mafia controls, you know, is price fixing. So they control what is going to be asked for, what the price will be for the farmers. And so they have no access in terms of being able to sell their goods, even if they wanted to. Obviously, that's controlled by this little mafia that says, no, we're the only way that you get to the factories. You have to go through us, which is a way of price fixing. It's well known. It's known it needs to be fixed. But the problem is that it's the main economic driver in the region, too. So you have a lot of people.

It's a kind of a chicken and the egg kind of thing. And so my promotion is that this is a place that needs to do agro-tourism. It needs to do small niche production of things. It's amazing for that. Again, that takes longer investment, takes more education. But ultimately, you're engaged in a kind of living that you aren't when you're just sort of cutting the branches once every spring and then getting a thousand lot in the fall. It should be said, Georgians are not famous for their parsimony or thrift. Or, you know, one of my likes is pretty much like the greatest, you know, maxim, you know, kind of like it sums up a bit, you know, the Georgian approach to life.

This is from Night in the Panther's Skin, which is the most famous, you know, kind of golden age poetic tome in Georgia. Spending on feasting and wine is better than hoarding our substance. That which we give makes us richer. That which is hoarded is lost. So, it is very much an anti-saving kind of society, which appeals to me as someone who knows functions on the same wavelength. But, you know, I don't think I would do well in a universe where I was paid all at once, once a year. Like, I don't think that would be good for her. I think, yeah, yeah. Anyway. Yeah. Go ahead. Other questions. Yeah. What else do you guys have? The white wine had a parallel. It was a pairing tip that it pairs really well.

And I'm going to pronounce it incorrectly, of course. But P-K-H-A-I-L. And then there was another tasting now on another bottle shown today that had a Cornelian cherry. And we're wondering what those two things were. The Cornelian cherry is a particularly good one, I know that one, but you're on your own, Bill. But if you can, The Cornelian cherries. So in Georgia, it's also a land of cherries. We have, you know, basically we have Bing cherries that are sold. We have sweet cherries. And of course, if you go to Michigan and north in Washington state, you can get a ton of other cherries. In Georgia, there are a lot of different cherries, especially sour kinds of cherries. So the Cornelian cherry is a smaller, more tart cherry, as I understand, as I call it in Georgia.

And so that, but the P-K-H-A-L-I, I don't know. I think they were talking about the P-K-H-A-L-I. Well, Pate is the worst name. Pate is the worst, yeah. It makes it sound, it dumbs it, it makes it sound like some like terrible vegan alternative to pâté, and it's f-ing delicious. It's like a fruit dip. Like a vegetable dip. Yeah, in the sense that like Georgians, prior to the New World being discovered, like most of Europe, was eating a lot of different foods and majority of Georgian foods, especially in the western part of the country, was lots of different greens, indigenous greens, bitter greens, being mixed together. Together, you know, cooked in different ways, and this is a way that you can kind of preserve it, and so it's rich with garlic, walnuts, and blue fenugreek.

These are the kind of the three characteristic ingredients in Pali, and also a lot of Georgian food, so walnuts are used everywhere. Also, Georgia is likely to be one of the oldest places of walnuts, so that's another thing that you can go into. There's a guy I met a guy at UC Davis who does... I don't think he collects all the genetic matter; I don't think that netbook series has legs and all, yeah, I don't think so, that's right. The guy at UC Davis did it, was excited about it, but uh, you know, so the anyway, but It's, it's a savory, uh kind of just uh garlicky really lovely sort of dip. Um, but again Georgian aren't dipping anything in it usually they're just eating it with bread or by itself and you can make it from any vegetable so I mean and it's just...

But then there's all these arts about how you which ones you blanch, which ones boil, how you get the spice mixture correct. So Pali is uh one of my favorite Georgian dishes, yeah, there you go Carlos! It should it should be said, so I I uh gave uh Carl Capelbo, uh amazing woman, um gifted writer. This is a great book, um it's a happens to be a cookbook but it's essentially a travelogue and a cookbook and it's amazing and then um in dc we have two world-class georgian restaurants uh uh uh supra and um uh tabla um tabla it's just around the corner from my house and it has so many fancy restaurants it's so many been living it's aks grac cũng yeah just go there order it it's it's it's it's very different um but it's delicious um yeah yeah um any other questions um when did you graduate from st john's one of our guests um also did in 1990 and actually has um has a named their child um uh Timmerland that inspired uh I feel like y'all should meet if you haven't yeah I graduated in 2009 um is that right yeah It seems right and um and yeah so, tonight I also had some siblings that went to St. John's too, so there's been some some presence of us, our family since 2000, um but yeah, then it's 90s were a fun time and St. John's is always different periods of time, um, I hope Timmerland is, is uh living up to his name in positive ways, uh thank you for answering all of our questions, I really appreciate it, um that's great, uh listen man, I'm gonna, I'm now this is with the time when Noel hijacks this uh thing and reads you this poem because you're oh nice, oh it's gonna work okay, I live I live to be hijacked by poetry, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna play us out. I'm going to play 'Play Me Out' with Walt Whitman, this is a number 14 from the Song of Myself, and it really encapsulates a lot of what we, a lot of the themes that we talked about today, um, at the end especially, um, about and also why we tried to make the films, um, and I've, and I was constantly quoting it at people in Georgia, so that's why I'm going to quote it that to you, so it's number 14, Walt Whitman's 'Song of Myself', the wild gander leads his flock through the cold night, you honk, he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation; the pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listen close, find its purpose and place up there toward the wintry Sky the sharp-hoofed moose of the north, the cat on the house sill, the chickadee, the prairie dog, the litter of the grunting sow as they tug at her teats, the brood of the turkey hen and she with her half-spread wings; I see the in them and in myself the same old law. The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections. They scorn the best I can do to relate them. I am enamored of growing outdoors, of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods, of the builders and the steers of ships and the wielders of axes and mauls and the drivers of horses.

I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out. What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest is me. Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns, adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me. Not asking the sky to come down to my goodwill, scattering it freely forever. That's the spirit of Georgia. So even though it was written by an American. So God Almighty,  just.