Editor’s note: Inspired by our Wine Clubs in Tbilisi, Lisbon and Athens and the grape harvest season, we have asked our correspondents to share the stories of winemakers and wine shops that are making a splash in their city for our Wine Week 2020. We are in Terjola, Imereti, sitting at a cozy front-yard table under a womb-like gazebo of intertwined grape vines, and our host Gia Chubinidze has brought another pair of bottles for us to try. We had already gone through a host of whites and were moving on to his reds. “This one had 14 days of skin maceration,” he declares of his 2019 otskhanuri sapere with a nose of black pepper and licorice. It is outstanding wine, like everything he has poured for us, but then Gia is no ordinary winemaker.

We pull off the recently finished section of highway at the Argveta exit in Imereti, follow Google Maps to a hand-painted sign directing us along a bumpy lane to an open iron gate with painted flowers, and park our car as if we live here. The front yard is lush with fruit trees, children’s toys are neatly scattered about, and a hammock under the shade of a large walnut invites us to lounge next to an enormous stone table. Before we sit here and never get up, Giorgi Zhorzhorladze steps out of his neat two-story house trimmed in red bricks, greets us with a warm “Gamarjoba!” (“Hello there!”) and welcomes us inside, to another realm.

In 2013, Anthony Bourdain and the Parts Unknown team arrived in Batumi, the capital of Adjara, to shoot the first segment of their Georgian adventure. The show’s producers invited Zamir Gotta, a Russian sidekick unfamiliar with the city, to join him. They visited a casino, strip club and mediocre restaurant for khashi, tripe soup, which failed to impress Bourdain. When the episode aired, local social media users flamed with disappointment over the Batumi portion in particular: “Casinos and strip clubs! That’s not Batumi!” While they aren’t the places we would have taken Anthony Bourdain, they are most certainly Batumi, along with the rainy summers and stifling subtropic air, the new five-star hotels and crumbling Khrushchyovkas (Soviet apartment buildings), a McDonald’s housed in an award-winning modern structure and a chacha-spouting fountain that dried up shortly after it was built in 2012.

It was a scorcher of a summer day in 2002, and we were pushing our broken Russian motorcycle and sidecar through crowded Plekhanov streets with a gnarly case of cotton mouth. Dripping in sweat, we limped up to the kiosk by our building and slipped some coins to the lovely Irma for a lifesaving cold bottle of Borjomi mineral water. She reached into her little fridge and passed a bottle to our trembling hands. We twisted it open, took a deep three-gulp pull and grabbed our neck in a panic, alcoholic vapors steaming from every pore of our body. Gasping, we handed the bottle back to her. “This is not Borjomi,” we wheezed. She sniffed it and jumped back. “Oh sorry. That is my husband’s spiritus,” she explained, replacing it deep into the fridge with a real bottle after checking it first.

We met Tega at a friend’s dinner table shortly after moving to Tbilisi in 2002. Tall, debonair, with dark puppy eyes and an ever-present Colgate smile, Tega made it a point from that first meeting to take us under his wing and introduce us to the best Tbilisi had to offer. That was how we first ended up at Salobie, near the ancient capital of Mtskheta. “This place is famous for its beans,” he said. “And its name is Beans!” he chortled (lobio means “beans” in Georgian, and salobie is “house of beans”). The restaurant felt like something between a museum and a summer mountain resort. We were in the original dining room, built next to a giant 300-year-old wooden house from Racha.

Last week we stopped at Prego, a Georgian-owned Italian restaurant, for an extra-large pizza paradiso, a delicate thin crust brushed with a light tomato sauce and baked, then topped with thin slices of ham, fresh tomatoes and shredded lettuce, and sprinkled with fresh parmesan. For summer, there isn’t a more refreshing pizza pie. We were the only seated customers and had to wait around 30 minutes for the kitchen to finish an enormous two-scooter delivery order. We might have grumbled had this not been July 2020, when a global pandemic has every restaurant owner in the country gnawing their fingernails to stubs. We were happy to see that our favorite place for pizza was serving at all.

Georgia had planned to open its borders to tourists on July 1, and we had intended to do some wine tasting in Kakheti about the same time – two plans that failed utterly. While no one is really sure why Georgia spent weeks preparing us for an open border only to snuff the plan at the last minute, our plan fizzled because we could not find a designated driver. But we still had a holiday. We stayed at Vazisubani Estate, a 19th-century palace that belonged to Sulkhan Chavchavadze, a nobleman with a penchant for winemaking and 20 hectares of vineyards, which became victims of a history that included the Romanovs, as well as the Soviets.

Editor’s note: As summer heats up, we’re looking to get outside. So we asked our contributors to write about their favorite spots to eat outdoors as well as nearby shops to fill a picnic basket for Picnic Week 2020. The greatest picnic in my life was at an elevation of 6,100 feet in the Tushetian village of Omalo for Mariamoba, Assumption Day, 2001. Sheep were escorted three times around the local chapel before being slaughtered in a ritualistic “sacrifice,” then butchered into chunks and boiled in a cauldron for khashlama, a type of stew, and ground into khinkali meat. Toast after toast of wine and chacha brought from the Kakheti lowlands made for the greatest bacchanalia in the name of the Virgin Mary, ever. In the morning, bodies littered the meadow, fetal and sprawled, where their last stumbling steps dropped them on their way home like sacks of boneless flesh.

The officials from the Ministry of Health came late in the evening on a Friday night and entered Tbilisi’s popular gastro-entertainment complexes Fabrika and Ghvinis Karkhana-Wine Factory #1. They knew there would be a lot of people here celebrating life again after two and a half months in lockdown. They also understood that even with tables spaced two meters apart, as required, it is difficult to control social distancing after people have had a few drinks. For authorities looking to tally up some fines, it was like shooting ducks in a wine barrel. A total of 16 establishments were fined 10,000 lari ($3,273) in what restaurant owners have described as “raids” two weekends ago for violating Covid-19 regulations. Among the six places at Ghvinis Karkhana that were penalized was Number 8 BBQ House for not having a list of employee temperatures and violating social distancing rules.

My love affair with the Deserter’s Bazaar began in 2001 when I first wandered into the marketplace like a pie-eyed flower child on his very first acid trip. The air seethed with leaded exhaust, stinky cheese, stale body odor and the incessant honking of jalopies. Streets and sidewalks disappeared under tables and blankets displaying everything from village produce and contraband alcohol to Dostoevsky novels and wooden utensils. Shoulder-to-shoulder, people bumped and shuffled and haggled while sweaty men with cigarettes hanging from their lips parted the mass with iron push carts. I returned to Georgia the next year and, as luck would have it, shacked up with a friend a block away from the market, which became my playground. Six somewhat square blocks selling anything you could put a tag on.

Gio Malatsidze kneels down and carefully brushes sand off the plexiglass lid of his kvevri. Five hundred liters of tavkveri wine have been resting for two years in this large clay vessel buried in the ground. Next to it is an open kvevri of healthy chinuri, also two years old. He gently pries the lid off, sealed with silicone putty, cautious not to let any debris fall inside, and frowns. A white film is floating on the surface. Gio dips a wine glass inside, spreading the flotsam away and takes a sip of the dark plum colored wine, washing his mouth with it. It is on the edge but can be rescued, he explains, dipping a carafe to fill our glasses so we can taste what he is talking about. Making natural wine is a risky business.

The last time I was in a restaurant was March 7. I had bumped into three friends at Sulico Wine Bar and after draining our last bottle of wine we walked down to Republic 24, chef Tekuna Gachechiladze’s latest tour de force. Recalling the lustrous pork belly and the devilish succulence of her khinkali is making me salivate like a thirsty vampire, particularly after burping the blasphemous supermarket khinkali we pulled out of the freezer and boiled for lunch just now. We evacuated Tbilisi shortly after that, stoked up the wood burner in Garikula and unpacked our bags. With a pantry packed with provisions, our first weeks in the village went by as pleasantly as could be during a global pandemic.

This year was going to be a big one for Oda Family Winery. Since its humble beginning in 2016, the winery and family farm-to-table restaurant in western Georgia’s Samegrelo region had been carefully expanding with the increasing popularity of its outstanding wine and formidable fare. This year, Keto Ninidze and Zaza Gagua calculated 3,000 guests would visit their restaurant, located in the front yard of their family’s oda (a traditional wooden two-storey house) in Martvili, so they emptied their savings and added new washrooms and a storage room for wine equipment, made a larger garden, and advertised for seven more employees to add to their staff of three. Then coronavirus arrived. “Thank God I didn’t hire any of the applicants and they didn’t leave their jobs,” Keto says.

The coronavirus infection rate is currently slowing down in Georgia to only several a day (with an occasional exception), and this is about four weeks after Easter, during which some churches insisted on still holding services and had us all biting our nails. Travel restrictions are being lifted, and the government has penciled in June 8 as the day restaurants with outdoor seating can reopen. We just don’t know what conditions will be imposed on everyone. Will waitstaff and clients have to wear masks? How many people per table? Will khinkali be served in individual portions instead of on a huge communal platter? There are lots of questions, perhaps the biggest being, “Who will survive?”

We recently spoke to Lisa Granik MW about her book, “The Wines of Georgia” (Infinite Ideas, November 2019). Granik became a Master of Wine in 2006, and was a Professor of Wine at the New York Institute of Technology from 2013-15. Currently she advises wine companies and regions seeking to improve their sales in the United States. Granik, who has written for publications such as The New York Times, The World of Fine Wine and Sommelier Journal, dives into Georgian wine culture in this title, explaining not only grape varieties, terroirs, winemaking methods and viticulture but also the centrality of wine to Georgian culture generally.