Georgian toasts are famous, arduous and daunting, and there is a well-developed ritual. Zaza ordered a remarkably large glass pitcher of red wine with our beers (Zviadi, our driver, sat stoic with his coffee and cigarettes). We’re never gonna down that thing, I thought, but we did.
Zaza’s toasts were masterful little journeys backward to wherever he wanted to finish. He'd start out with “Now I would like to toast to one man…” and end up with a salute to the traveling spirit.
“Even little things have a beauty,” he began again, and did a little riff on “be here now.”
In between toasts and shovelfuls of plate after plate of food, Zaza hit on the current political war [Note: this was 2006, before the actual shooting war.] between his country and its huge northern neighbor, which had soured to the extent that, gasp, Russia had banned Georgian wine.
“All people know in Russia,” this was a simple declaration of fact, “Georgian wine is better. It is only politics.”
It’s a circumlocutionary skill:
“All good history is continuous” evolves into a toast to friendship.
A particularly poignant toast, I thought, started out “Every moment is the present” and ended up being to “people who are at home worrying about us.”
A cousin to cheese pizza called khachapuri is just stunningly good. The ‘pickle’ was an array of cucumbers, tomatoes and red onions, and a salad came as a plate laden with green onions, flat-leaf parsley and dill.
There were kebabs and French beans and fungus, a beef salad, greens that tasted vaguely like licorice, stuffed baby aubergines, a beef salad and a deep dish of fried cheese, yet more bread, a sauce called Satsivi to go with barbecued meat, another salad that looked like thyme sprigs, lemonade, a pitcher of wine and several more beers and many more toasts.
It may be the savior of the Georgian soul, or at least its work ethic, that Georgian wine is mild, and doesn’t object to being gulped. We drank and Zaza toasted and he toasted and we drank and we all ate, until lunch hit the two hour mark and we were scarcely outside Tbilisi, the Georgian Military Highway was still a theory, and we’d reached mid-afternoon.
Still the toasts as we lingered, and finally, with a lofty start, Zaza began the parting toast “To safe journey,” which ended sometime later more earthily, with a smile and the assurance that once we were in Kazbegi, "then again we can drink.”
In the spring before our visit, President Putin banned Georgia wine, bottled water and produce from Russia on the pretense that they didn’t meet basic health standards. It was a political irritant for Georgia, nothing more, but I should say this particular Georgian wine left us feeling considerably more healthy as we got up to leave.
An excerpt from the eventual book, Common Sense and Whiskey, by Bill Murray.
Read more from the eventual book on Common Sense and Whiskey or, on EarthPhotos.com, read stories about Greenland, Siberia, Tibet and Malawi.
(Photo of the 14th century Trinity Church (Tsminda Sameba) near Mt. Kazbegi, Caucasus mountains, Republic of Georgia, from the EarthPhotos.com Georgia Gallery.)
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