Tbilisi’s Best Wine Bars

Georgia’s astounding winemaking tradition traces back eight millennia, and is not to be missed. From the country’s different varieties, terroirs, and winemaking methods, there’s a lot to learn – and taste – when it comes to Georgian wine. As a starting point (or simply for those who don’t have time to venture out of the city), Tbilisi’s wine bars are a great place to have a glass or two and dig into Georgian viticulture. Wine bars are a relatively new trend in Georgia and about the greatest thing to happen since the invention of the kvevri, the characteristic ceramic vessels for fermenting and storing traditional Georgian wine.

Market Recovery

We used to live across the street from Dinamo Stadium, on the edge of the Deserter’s Bazaar and part of the Vagzalis Bazroba – Station Bazaar – complex, a sprawling, unhinged confederacy of free-marketers selling everything from counterfeit apparel to contraband from Russia, secondhand cell phones and coffee beans labeled Nescafé. Zaza, a musician and our roommate at the time, served as our guide. His song “Vashlis Gamyidvelo,” about an apple seller who sold him a beautiful but rotten apple, was a big hit on the radio and made him quite the local celebrity. Shopping with Zaza at the bazaar meant lots of discounts and free drinks at the many wine stands back then.

Mukhrani Nursery

In March, as the teasing wafts of spring begin to fill the air, local farmers converge at the entrance of the Sunday bazaar in Garikula where they lean against their old jalopies with bundled fruit tree saplings and grapevine seedlings for sale. For someone who wants to start a little backyard vineyard with a handful of vines, the bazaar is a fine place to shop. More ambitious wine growers, however, need to go to a grafting nursery and place an order. In Shida Kartli, one of the largest is run by a family who has been nursing grapevines for generations. Kobe Cherqezishvili, his wife, Maia Dalakishvili, and their sons, Beso and Gio, tend to over 500 varieties at their seven-hectare nursery in Mukhrani, which they opened in 2004.

Bagelin

Being an expat means learning to live without a lot of comforts that we ordinarily take for granted back home – things like bagels, ripe Haas avocados, extra-dry Martinis, corn tortillas and enforced traffic laws. Sometimes we meet people who have a hard time adjusting to a life without Pop-Tarts and spend their leisure time whining about everything that’s not like home. Other times you meet a person like Andrew Moffatt. A physicist by education, Andy was crunching numbers as a bank analyst in his native Australia when it dawned on him that there was a hell of a lot more to life than making PowerPoint presentations and status reports. He turned his back on the safe and predictable career and spent the next four years traveling the world, picking up cooking tips along the way.

Coronavirus Diary

It has been 12 months since the novel coronavirus was first detected in Georgia. It was about the same time two CB colleagues, Celia from Lisbon and Chiara from Naples, arrived for a brief visit and joined us for what would be one of our last food walks of the year. Later, we went to one of our favorite restaurants, Aristeaus, where four guys at a table casually sipping wine broke out into goose-bump-inducing polyphony while we dined near the fireplace on shkmeruli, kupati, dambalkhacho and a bottle of fine rkatsiteli. As dinner memories go, this ranks highly not only for its serendipitous brilliance, but also because it would be the last time we would ever eat there – the restaurant closed for good in late 2020.

Elvis

Having food delivered used to feel like a very decadent thing to do in Tbilisi. Probably because our neighbors, who tend to be ever judging, would scurry to their windows at the sound of a full throttle motor scooter bouncing up our cobblestone lane. “What’s that they’re doing?” we could imagine them mumbling, watching us walk out as if we’re making a drug deal, self-conscious and counting out money only to hurry back home with a couple of pizza boxes. Nobody had meals delivered in Georgia. It didn’t take long, however, to get over our insecurity. When a takeout sushi joint opened a few blocks away, we called them to deliver instead of making the five-minute walk to fetch the maki rolls, simply because we could.

Mama Terra

Anthony Bourdain liked to say the body is a playground, a sentiment we couldn’t agree with more, especially when digging into the cholesterol-laden acharuli khachapuri or wiping a ketsi clean of its spicy pool of kupati – Georgian sausage – grease with a piece of bread. Shots of chacha and glasses of wine make us swing, bounce, teeter-totter and sometimes fall, and in the morning when the fog and pain clears, we may remember that the body is also a fragile temple requiring more ministration than a sacrificial bowl of tripe soup can provide. In Tbilisi’s Mtatsminda district there is a sanctuary providing both solace to devotees of healthy eating and penance to gluttonous sinners like us. No ordinary hummus bar, this affectionate “eating apartment” is called Mama Terra – Veggie Corner.