Last June, Georgian lawmakers invited a Russian legislator to address an international assembly of Christian Orthodox devotees from the Speaker of Parliament’s chair. This, predictably, did not go over well. Thousands poured into the streets and gathered at the Tbilisi parliament building demanding explanations, resignations and reform from a government many believe is much too cozy with the country that invaded Georgia in 2008, occupies some 20 percent of its territory and quietly moves the border whenever it feels like it. The protests were violently broken up by riot police, who shot rubber bullets into the faces of demonstrators. Russian President Vladimir Putin immediately imposed a ban on all direct flights from Russia to Georgia because Russians, he insisted, were in physical danger in Georgia, which wasn’t the case at all. Shortly after the ban, the BBC reported how welcomed Russian guests felt in Georgia. However, the relationship between the two peoples is rather complicated.

The name Aristaeus Ethno Wine Bar suggests many things, some puzzling but the most obvious being that wine is served. One look at the menu, though, and it becomes clear this spot is more restaurant than bar. One food item in particular caught our attention: dambalkhacho. We first heard of dambalkhacho some years back when a friend offered us hard, moldy cheese bits cut from a ball about the size of a healthy orange. It was rich, slightly peppery with a sharp, tart finish; nothing like any cheese we had ever tried.

2019 was a good year for prying ourselves out of our Tbilisi comfort zone, filling the tank and getting out of town. For us it is a way to connect to the captivating earthy genuineness that prompted us to move here, but this year we wanted to meet some of the people who have become part of what we call a “return to the village” trend. On one trip to Kakheti last winter, we visited Sopo Gorgadze and Levan (Leo) Tsaguria, a Tbilisi couple who left the city to resume new lives as farmers in the village of Shalauri. Kicking back in their living room looking at the Caucasus Mountains stretching across the Alazani Valley, we learned how they became cheesemakers more by coincidence than by design.

In Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhazia, there is an old pier with a sorrowful rusting shell of a café poking out over the Black Sea. What had been a dining room is a vacant space that mostly seems to serve as a public urinal, while upstairs a kiosk-sized café serves Turkish-style coffee, beer and snacks with plastic tables and chairs for locals who bitterly recall when the café was one of the most happening spots in Sukhumi. Georgians and Abkhaz dined, drank and danced together at the café, called Amra, until war erupted in 1992, and these friends and neighbors began killing each other. Within a year, much of what had been the capital of the Soviet Union’s “Red Riviera” was destroyed and as the Abkhaz advanced, some 250,000 Georgians were forced to flee their homes, not realizing they would never be able to return.

Renowned orange wine expert and award winning writer Simon J. Woolf tells the full history of this ancient wine and its modern struggle to gain acceptance in Amber Revolution: How the World Learned to Love Orange Wine (Interlink Books; Fall 2018). While the focus is mainly on orange wine history and culture in Slovenia, Italy and Georgia, the book also includes profiles of 180 of the best producers from 20 countries worldwide and is crammed full of all the information you need to find the best orange wines worldwide. We spoke to Woolf about the relationship between natural and orange wine, how Georgia fits into this story, the future of orange wine and much more.

In the latest installment in our Book Club series, we spoke to Alice Feiring about her new book, Natural Wine for the People (Ten Speed Press, 2019), a compact illustrated guide to natural wine. While this category is becoming enormously popular, especially in the U.S., there is still a lot of confusion about what exactly natural wine is, where to find it and how to enjoy it. This easy-to-understand primer sets the record straight. Feiring is the author of four other books, including For the Love of Wine: My Odyssey through the World’s Most Ancient Wine Culture, which was the subject of a previous CB Book Club Q&A. A prominent figure in the natural wine movement, she also publishes the natural wine newsletter The Feiring Line.

We used to spend a lot of time in western Georgia’s Samegrelo region when breakaway Abkhazia was our beat. Zugdidi, the regional capital, was our overnight stop coming and going across the river to the disputed land in the north. Our local friends would welcome us with Megrelian hospitality, decorating their tables with hearty and spicy local fare that made us purr. The wine, however, with its sweet barnyard vinegary tang, was a different story. We assumed that this subtropic-like land, with its year-round lushness and mandarin, hazelnut and overgrown tea fields, was hostile to good wine grapes. We didn’t realize back then that the practice of making sugar-wine was not exclusively a Megrelian thing, but a Communist legacy practiced throughout the country.

This is a piece that celebrates the odd, the misshapen and the sometimes grotesque – in other words, what to look for to find a really tasty tomato. Just to be clear, we are talking about tomatoes from Sakartvelo here. Sakartvelo? You might know it better as Georgia, but Sakartvelo – literally, the dwelling place of the Kartvelian, or Georgian, people – is what natives call their country. And some Georgians say Sakartvelo should be the official name for everyone else too, to avoid confusion with a certain U.S. state that wasn’t even a colonialist’s dream when Georgia the country was already 1,200 years old, but which now irritatingly hogs all the Google limelight.

Georgia is a small country with a huge appetite for life. This passion is evident in all aspects of the country’s extraordinary culture, from its ancient polyphonic songs and breathtaking national dances to its rich culinary heritage and winemaking tradition that goes back eight millennia. To become better acquainted with this unique region, we have organized a seven-day trip in partnership with Atlas Obscura – “In the Cradle of Wine: A Georgian Culinary Adventure” – that focuses on all the senses, with special emphasis on taste. It is a mouthwatering, belt-popping, intimate dive into the heart of Georgia.

The pavement ended about five kilometers back – that, combined with torrential rains, has made for a bumpy, muddy ride. We are in Kala, a scattering of old stone and wooden homes deep in the bowels of the Svanetian highlands. Tomorrow is Kvirikoba, the most revered religious holiday in the region. Hundreds of people will make the vertical pilgrimage to St. Kvirike and Ivlita’s Church, an 11th-century impossibility of a creation erected on a thumbnail of granite high above the wild Enguri River. Our host is 25-year-old Mariam Khardziani, who returned with her twin sister and aunt to their decaying family home two years ago; they fixed up the traditional two-story house, made of slate and wood, and now rent it as a summertime guesthouse.

It wasn’t so long ago that no one would venture to Georgia’s Svaneti region without a personal invitation, and even that was risky. Isolated, sky-high in the Caucasus, nestled between the breakaway territory of Abkhazia and the Russian Federation, it was land of the lost, inhabited by a tribe speaking their own language, living in hamlets dominated by tall medieval stone towers used for protection from invading hordes as well as from each other. Ancient pagan-Christian rituals, bride-napping, blood vendettas and banditry defined modern Svaneti – at least when viewed from the outside. We had heard too many stories of how oblivious tourists would wander there with cameras around their necks and big tourist grins only to return in their underwear with their heads hanging low. Like Georgians from the rest of the country, we stayed away.

On June 20, Georgian Prime Minister Mamuka Bakhtadze signed a decree abolishing the Writer’s House of Georgia, Tbilisi’s leading institution of literary culture and the home of Cafe Littera, the restaurant that gave birth to the culinary revolution Georgia is currently going through. As soon as the ink was dry, the Writer’s House accounts were frozen and its directors were suddenly dismissed with only half a month’s salary. The fate of Cafe Littera is unknown. The story of the Writer’s House goes back to 1905, when philanthropist and father of Georgian brandy, David Sarajishvili, completed construction of an Art Nouveau masterpiece of a house to commemorate his 25th wedding anniversary to Ekaterine Porakishvili.

We bit into the khinkali, its handmade dough indelicate and sticky, as we like it. Steam poured out the newly made hole, and we blew lightly before slurping up the rich stock and gobbling the dumpling down, even the puckered knob. The ground pork and beef was packed with fresh cilantro, the juices absorbed into the jacket. It was a perfect khinkali. A home wrecker. This seducer of a dumpling is molded by the knowing hands of Manana Osapashvili, born in Gudamakhari, a mountain village in Pasanauri, the heartland of khinkali. A professional cook for 29 years, Manana has been making khinkali since she was 10 years old. Today, she is running the kitchen at Sioni 13, located at the Tbilisi Theological Seminary in Old Town. It is a part of the city known for its tourists and hookah bars, and the mediocre "traditionnel" Georgian restaurants that cater to them.

You pass through the doleful Imeretian coal town of Tkibuli, wind 750 meters up the Nakerala pass and just as you catch your breath from the climb, you lose it again dropping down from the summit, for you have entered Racha-Lechkhumi, one of the most gorgeous regions in Georgia. We were first here in 2004, for an art festival organized by a local poet who had the unnerving habit of always speaking in verse. Since that mind-bending weekend, the regional capital of Ambrolauri hasn’t changed much. There is a new little airport, a few modest hotels, a couple humble restaurants, and a giant bottle of Khvanchkara that still stands in the middle of town, though it has been renovated. The vibe is as mellow as ever.

West Georgia's climate is ideal for tea, and Georgia has been producing high quality tea since 1847. On our Old Market & Beyond culinary walk in Tbilisi, we get a chance to see, smell and taste fine samples of tea and other delicacies in the Dezerter's Bazaar - the Georgian capital’s largest and oldest open-air marketplace.