A WINE LOVER'S GUIDE TO GEORGIA

After decades of conflict that obscured much of its rich cultural heritage, this country is rediscovering itself. Celebrate its rebirth with a winding adventure from the bars and restaurants of the capital to the family-run wineries of rural villages, says Carla Capalbo

- Carla Capalbo

Three of my grandparents were born in Italy; they emigrated to America before World War I but never forgot their Italian childhoods. My Piemontese grandmother, Marie, often talked to me about her own grandmother. She lived simply in the country, had a pet pig called Cleopatra, made cheese from her cows’ milk, kept silkworms, extracted lanolin from sheep’s wool and grew vegetables and grapes for the family’s wine.

I was resident in Italy for more than 20 years and spent much of that time living in – and writing about – rural communities in several regions. By then, European Union rules had ended this type of integrated agriculture. Even in areas where monoculture was shunned, it was no longer possible nor desirable to produce a little of everything. Vineyards are rarely still interspersed with fruit trees; you can no longer keep a few goats or cows for home use: most animals have been grouped indoors with more industrial husbandry. I always regretted not having been able to experience Sicily or Piedmont as it was then. Self-sufficient agriculture appeals to me and seems ever more important.

Maybe that’s why I fell in love so quickly with Georgia. Within days of being there for the first time, eight years ago, I felt I’d finally found home. Driving west from Tbilisi with a group of fellow wine lovers who, like me, had attended the second international qvevri symposium, I parsed the landscape from my window. Here were simple, two-storey houses surrounded by vegetable patches, fruit trees and vines that resembled my childhood stories. Fields were small and often flanked by woods or decorative wrought iron. As our coach slowed and wove around cows idling in the road, or passed pigs lazing in muddy ditches, I felt a kind of thrill.