Kachreti: Wine

Kachreti, Georgia

"The vintage" is the grape harvest in Georgia.

Kakheti, an administrative region in Georgia, proudly claims ownership of the best wines in Georgia.

In Georgia, there is white wine, red wine, and black wine. There's also a wine that I don't know how to categorize that is the color of iced-tea.

Saturday, TLG took us volunteers to a vocational college in Kachreti, a village in Kakheti. The students learn how to make wine in the traditional way, allowing the grape juice to ferment in clay pots buried in the ground. The pots are called qvevri.

We volunteers took a token turn at harvesting grapes, placing them into buckets, which were then placed in a gigantic basket, which was on a donkey cart.

We accompanied the donkey and wagon to the stone and wood wine house, where there was a little ribbon-cutting ceremony marking the opening of this year's vintage.

In Georgia, males stomp the grapes. I don't know if they must be virgins.

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Georgians, like other wine-makers, do use casks for aging the wine. But they have another tradition in which they place the future wine in clay jugs (kvevri) and bury them in the ground to ferment.

Kachreti: Beekeeping

Kachreti, Georgia

A group of us TLG volunteers spent Saturday at the Kachreti vocational college, which teaches students about traditional agricultural crafts.

Yesterday, I talked about making churchkhela. Today is a pictorial about beekeeping at the college.

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

Kachreti, Georgia

My hostess, Nely, told me the honey in the Georgian regions have their own distinctive flavors. In one area, the bees tend to feast on the citrus orchards. In another area, the bees go to the fields. And in the area Nely believes produces the best honey, the bees go to the forests and harvest the nectar of chestnut blossoms. 

Kachreti: The Vocational College

TLG took us today to a vocational college in Kachreti, a village in Georgia's premier wine region, Kakheti. (My former hostess, Nino, is from Gurjaani, another village in Kakheti. My current hostess' village is Kardanakhi, also in Kakheti.)

The college teaches students about Georgia's traditional methods of agricultural life. How to use the old ways to make:

• Wine 
• Chacha
• Bread
• Svardi (the beloved Georgian barbecue, cooked on metal skewers over a wood fire)
• Khinkali, the Georgian dumpling
• Churchkhela
• Buildings
• ... and so on

Go here for excellent photos of the college by Georgina Anderson, who spent time here as part of a Georgian-USA agricultural program.

This college - a great idea. I like when communities invest resources to preserve traditional knowledge and practices.

We saw a number of traditional activities exhibited for us at the college. Today I'll focus on churchkhela.

Churchkhela

Churchkhela represents a Georgian gestalt: A food item that embraces beauty and sweetness, that is portable and stores well, and is high-calorie to get citizens and soldiers through long marches and harsh winters.

Sausage-shaped, it has a skin made of boiled-down grape juice, a little flour, and perhaps some spices. Some regions prefer a thinner or thicker consistency of the skin. Here at the college, the consistency was very thick, almost to the point of stiffness, but still malleable.

 Inside are nutmeats (such as walnuts or hazelnuts) threaded on a string.

You dip the threaded nuts into the reduced grape juice mixture, spoon some of it on top, to make sure all of the nuts are covered, then lift the covered nuts from the pot. You hang the churchkhela on a nail to begin its curing process. 

One can eat the churchkhela immediately after being made, but it is not considered fully ripe until weeks later when it takes on a white crust, which comes from the sugar crystals emerging from the skin. If dried properly (in the fall), a churchkhela can be good to eat until spring.

Along the main road in Kakheti, there are many roadside stands with churchkela hanging from wooden racks.

Here is a modern-day recipe for churchkhela.

Georgia: The Legend We Help Write

I continue to admire the brains behind the TLG program, which has the stated purpose of bringing native English speakers (and more recently, French and Italian [and German?] speakers) to Georgia for the education of Georgia's schoolchildren and native-speaker practice for the Georgian teachers.

This stated purpose is brilliant, of course. But consider the side benefits. The Georgian and U.S. governments pay the volunteer teachers 600 lari per month, and this is the bang Georgia gets for its bucks:

• The Georgian government retains more than 100 lari of same in taxes per month (that we volunteers don't even see); 
• The host families receive 100 lari per month from the volunteers, which gets redistributed to the families' local economies; 
• The volunteers spend most of their remaining 400 lari in Georgia; and 
• The volunteers tell their friends and family about Georgia, creating positive buzz for the country, which helps it (and the U.S.) garner positive political street cred; and
• The volunteers' stories encourage tourism and investment, bringing dollars and euros to this financially-strapped country.

Genius.

The same dynamic applies to the excursions paid for by TLG (ahem, the Georgian and U.S. governments). We volunteer teachers get to go on all-expenses paid field trips to interesting places.

(Tomorrow, we will go to a vocational college in Kachreti, a village in Georgia's premier wine region, Kakheti.)

We take photos. We write blogs, write Facebook posts, send emails to families and friends. We help put Georgia on the map.

We are complicit in an ingenious public relations scheme where we add pages to The Legend that is Georgia.

As with all legends, there is the glory - the traditions, the food, the dance, the song, the beauty, the wine, the warrior spirit, the neighbor-for-neighbor ethic.  But glory has a constant companion: tragedies, troubled times, and the dark sides of traditions. Georgia has it all.