Signaghi

Cheese! Wine! Beans! Fresh bread! Never have two people been so thrilled about a change in culinary scene. We crossed the Azerbaijani border into Georgia and arrived in the medieval hilltop village of Signaghi. This is the heart of the Kakheti wine region and we celebrated our escape from grim food territories with three wine tastings and many plates of the national dish, khachapuri— a warm flat bread covered in salty, melted cheese. We paid £22 total for three nights of accommodation (maybe the cheapest private room we've had all year?), although we found out why it was so cheap. The room strongly recalled trying to share a chilly single bed in the Wolfson Annexe in Oxford, circa winter 2018. But hey ho, savings!

One of the first things we noticed on entry to Georgia is the number of EU flags flown alongside the national red-and-white crosses. Georgia aims to accede to the EU by 2030, but last year’s elections and Russian pressure have thrown those commitments into doubt. Though just one hour from the Azerbaijani border, it *feels* in Sighnaghi as though Europe isn’t that far off, with cobbled roads, an ancient citadel, good bread and cheese and a natural wine industry.

We started at Kerovani Wines and learnt about the qvevri method, which entails burying egg-shaped wine-casks underground to aid the fermentation process. The wines are mostly skin-contact ambers and reds so dark that they call one, Saperavi, ‘black wine’. We thought we knew a good bit about wines thanks to our year in Cape Town, but Georgian grapes are unlike anything we're familiar with. After the fall of the USSR, the vineyards in this region were divided up amongst the people working them, with the result that most families do a little wine production. We enjoyed the view and a cheese plate of such vastness that we could not finish it.

Since we're going to spend nearly three weeks in Georgia, we've made an effort to learn a bit more of the language in advance. Dan tried out his new vocab at the first tasting, trying to say "this is my favourite wine". The guy just laughed, before explaining that what Dan actually said was "This wine is my lover."

At our second tasting (Pheasant's Tears), Chelsea forgot her money pouch (safely returned the next day, 300GEL still intact). Then we walked up the hill to a brilliant viewpoint for our third tasting (Okro's Wines), where we made friends with a Thai-Chinese couple. The four of us got stuck into the chacha (local grappa). At 48% it was strong stuff and Chelsea apparently forgot our new friends weren't native English speakers, as she started to drop a few straightforward terms into the conversation like ‘volition’, ‘ubiquity’ and one of her favourite topics: ‘contemporary geopolitics’.

Apart from wine tasting, we enjoyed exploring the town and walked out to St Nino’s Bodbe Convent to see our first Eastern Orthodox church of the year. We also snooped around the parts of the citadel walls that are accessible and were thrilled with the views of the Caucusus mountains across the plains, snow caps just coming visible as the leaves turn.

Maybe we're jumping the gun with how excited we are about Georgia already, just because we finally had some nice meals after the culinary desert of Central Asia. But we're already pretty confident that "this country is my lover" 💗Baca lagi