Nothing about Icewine today. However, if you are enjoying reading about Abkhazia, please take a moment to look at Dr. Genie Pritchett’s blog as well.
Genie is an American doctor who volunteered with Doctors Without Borders, (MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES) to go to Abkhazia and her perspective is honest, interesting, and well written.
Find her blog here or cut and paste http://www.abkhaziaadventures.blogspot.com/
My friend Tim lives in Moscow and in his career he has been a school teacher in Sukhumi, a wine executive for a Georgian winery, a land developer in Moscow, and probably many other things I’ve yet to discover.
Tim’s English is excellent which is fortunate for me. My Russian language has already been demonstrated in previous articles to be enough to avoid a shotgun wedding at the Russian border and to convince hockey players to drink wine. Beyond that, I’m lost with the Russian language.
We were working on a bulk wine deal between Russia and South America and trying to ensure that we were on the same page about how a particular transaction might go. Tim told me this allegory which clears up a question about how serious a buyer or a seller is.
Tim’s story goes:
Two men sat down to talk business.
One said, “I will sell you one liter of honey for one dollar and twenty five cents”
The other said, “I will buy the liter of honey for eighty cents.”
They negotiated for a long time and eventually agreed on one dollar for the liter of honey.
Then both men got up from the table.
One man went to go find honey. The other man went to go find money.
I marvel that in the former Soviet Union there are a very large number of babies born and named Svetlana. It seems that half of the folks I met in or from the former Soviet Union countries are named Svetlana. This makes it easier to remember names, but harder to talk about them. “Svetlana from Moscow, Svetlana from St. Petersburg” is a distinction that must be made, but frankly that distinction is for my benefit. They are all the same to the people around me in Canada, except for the three Svetlanas I know who live in my small area of Canada.
They do help me though with nicknames. Svetlana from Sukhumi prefers Sveta. Svetlana from Novy Afon prefers Lana. My close friend Svetlana from Tashkent prefers Svetlana, but I can get a rise out of her by calling her “sweaty Lana” and she replies with “Philsky”
Lana is the head of Abkhazia’s International Department. She went to Moscow, took a University degree and began a rat race of a career in Moscow; a “good job”. Then she decided that she should ‘downshift’ and come back to Abkhazia to work. Her role in Akbhazia’s foreign ministry is underpaid, but she makes up for it teaching at the University.
Her English is exceptional, and when she started doing simultaneous translation between Minister of Agriculture and me, I was actually startled. It didn’t take me long to get used watching the Russian language coming out of my mouth in deep and foreign tones and into my ears in her very feminine, perfect English lilt, but the first few sentences caught me off guard.
She offered to take me sightseeing, much like I take people here to Niagara Falls and I was thrilled to have a chance to see some of the tourist sights. This area has a rich history. This is the region where the earliest recorded winemaking has been discovered, about 7500 BC. Schoolboys are taught about Jason and the Golden Fleece. This is where Jason and the Argonauts came to find it. It seems that lambs pelts are perfect for putting in mountain streams as they capture heavy gold particles in the wool and incidentally make a ‘golden fleece’. St. Peter (or locally called St. Simon) came here in 55AD and was killed near Novy Afon after a few years of hermitage. Nearby are the largest caves in the world. The New Athos Monastery is majestic on the nearby hill.
I’m not much of a tourist. The world’s largest caves would be interesting if there were no guardrails or signs like, “This way to the egress”.
In my free time in Moscow I did not see Red Square for two reasons; I couldn’t figure out how to cross the road to get to it, and I wasn’t that motivated because everything I saw was interesting. If you want a thrill ride in Moscow, I recommend Tim, my Georgian friend who drove me through the deserted streets around the Kremlin at 120 km at 3am in a mad burst of exhilaration. We were both stone cold sober and perhaps next time I’ll see more of the Kremlin. I do recall my hands on the dashboard, gripping tightly. I did see the Kremlin from the across or along the river, but I was perched high up in a nightclub called Soho Rooms, getting to know some rather interesting people.
So where is the soul of this land?
I have decided that it was with Lana, walking through some delightful woods to a small cave which is a shrine to a saint who lived 2000 years ago. We in the west typically call him St. Peter, but locally he is called by his birth name, St. Simeon. Lana pointed out red spots in the river which appear magically and are said to be the blood of St. Simeon. The locals killed him for some reason and now they revere him. The former Soviet world is full of such conundrums.
A garden of rocks sprouted out of nowhere. The river begins at the foot of a high rock face, bubbling out of the ground. It is clear and beautiful and there is no need for bottled water, drinking fountains, or pop stands. It is fresh and drinkable. In fact it stands out as beautiful tasting water, filtered through the Caucasus Mountains and popping up virtually untouched in the copse of trees at the foot of the cliff.
Novy Afon was missed by much of the destruction of the 1992 war so it remains reasonably pristine, but it joined the economic black hole that sucked in all of Abkhazia and it shows. There are no bullet holes, and the huge Georgian monastery of New Athos was untouched, as tempting as a target it must have been, by both sides in 1992.
Everybody in Abkhazia, indeed, all of the rural Caucasus, makes their own wine. Wine is the soul of hospitality among these incredibly hospitable people. Grape vines are trained up trees or trellises, harvest is done by hand, and fermentation happens in large clay pots that are buried in the ground in a shed as a natural form of climate control so the wine doesn’t overheat. Beside the largest pot is the second largest pot, and beside that is the third largest pot, in a cascade of ever smaller pots sunk into the earth of the wine cellar. The wine in the second smallest pot is poured into the next smaller and so on up to the largest pot to make room for the new harvest. Presumably some is drunk from each vintage year and the finest wine is often in the smallest pot.
Before I left, I read in a cooking book that the name of these pots was “Kvevri”
I only saw one in Abkhazia, on that walk to the shrine. It was turned over and we took pictures of each other standing beside it.
Lana was, I think pleased that I knew what it was, but she was sweet and patient but firm when she explained that “Kvevri” was the Georgian name and that the Abkhazian name was “Apshah”, which means something like “home of the soul”.
The only Ashrah I saw on this was upended, broken and would hold no souls. It was left on the side of a path on the way to a martyr’s shrine.
I met Fred Weir at the Canadian Embassy Icewine tasting in Moscow in June. Fred is a fellow Canadian who writes about Russia for Indian, Chinese, British and American newspapers, including the Christian Science Monitor. We had just enough time for a friendly chat and connect before I stood up and served enough Icewine to Moscow’s wine elite to drop a diabetic elephant into a deep coma.
A couple of weeks later, I was walking the quiet and calm waterfronts of Sukhumi. Max enjoys pop culture. Over glasses of Abkhazian wine, lavash and great cheeses we talked about his country until the conversation drifted away, and then we shifted to talk of Hunter Thompson and Ralph Steadman or other Rolling Stone issues. Max has an advantage in that while his country is isolated by the world, his work takes him abroad. This and his American education give him a perspective that most Abkhazians would not see. When I left, I gave Max a bottle of Dan Aykroyd Icewine.
Dan Aykroyd’s contribution to pop culture leaves an interesting patchwork. In the Soviet Union, he is well known, but when I mentioned Dan Aykoryd, some would light up and say, “Ghostbusters!” and others would light up and say “Blues Brothers”. This didn’t have so much to do with the age of the person I was talking to and I never did understand what made a Russian remember Ghostbusters over Blues Brothers or the other way around and not both.
I was thrilled about the Dan Aykroyd Icewine. When I shipped the samples to Moscow, it was a great tasting celebrity wine. When I got there three weeks later, it had won Ontario’s “Wine of the Year”. The medal and the recognition didn’t change the wine inside, but it was great to show that the home of Icewine was heaping honours on an Ontario boy and his wines.
A week later the prelude to August war between Abkhazia and their Russian protectors and Georgia started up in the form of car bombs, shootings and kidnappings. A bomb went off in the market where I had so enjoyed looking for local foods to pair with the Icewines. Another blast killed four people at a birthday party near the southern border. Reporters were sent into Abkhazia to cover the war.
“They always want to cover the war,” I recall Max saying about the reporters, “but there is so much more going on here.” But Max’s job was to meet with each of the media and he has presence so they all met him, usually followed by a pleasant but briefer and more formal meeting with Sergey Shamba, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Max’s boss.
For me, a delightful punch line came in an email from Fred shortly after he visited Abkhazia. Here it is in Fred’s own words,
“Yes, it’s a small world. I met at least two people down in Abkhazia who mentioned you. One of them was Max Gunjia, who started talking about ice wine in the midst of a political interview, then your name came up … Interesting place, Abkhazia;”
Part 1 left off with Max, Teddy, the Macedonian and I having dinner in a seaside cafe in Sukhumi.
During the dinner, Teddy invited me to visit the UNOMIG compound. I grew up as an army brat and lived on army bases all my life but I knew that this, I knew was going to be a visit of a different kind.
As I passed through the guardhouse at the gates the guards searched my laptop computer bag carefully, and an escort took me to Teddy’s office about 4pm.
Somehow we ended up at the base bar. The UNOMIG team is multinational. For example, their operating rules state that a four man observation team will take two trucks and that each of the four must be from different countries. I recognized the some of the country flags on their shoulders but Teddy made the introductions and ensured that I sat with beer in front of me and got to know his mates. Of course as a Canadian Icewine salesman, I was the oddity and I sensed that oddities are better than television for these guys.
The American chided the Zimbabwean beside me for the fact that the Zimbabwe election results were mired in problems with counting ballots. I leaned over and asked the American where he was from. “Florida”, he said. What irony! With rampant inflation the price of a bottle of Icewine in Zimbabwe currency was 1,174,000 dollars in July, 2008. The Zimbabwean took the brunt of the good natured jabs that day until the Australian, a larger than life caricature of an Australian, arrived to dish it out happily to everybody.
They were intensely curious about Icewine. I passed around one 200ml bottle of Pillitteri Shiraz Icewine that would retail in Moscow for about $400. They cradled it in reverence and when it had made it around the bar I asked if they would like to try some Icewine. The thought of a $400 quarter bottle of wine had them intrigued and the talk evolved into arranging an Icewine tasting for the UNOMIG guys the following night. I’m not sure whose idea it was, but I recall that Teddy kept a full beer in front of me the rest of the night.
Icewine, like all wines, is better paired with complementary food, good company and circumstance. I had the wines that I had carried over three borders in my suitcase left over from Moscow wine tastings. The company would be superb. However, this wine tasting at the end of the world, in a place that sounded like a Harry Potter destination needed some food pairing.
The next day, Lana offered to show me around the Sukhumi market to pick up fruits and cheeses.
Lana is the head of the International Department in Akbhazia’s foreign affairs department. Like many well educated Abkhazians, she took a degree in a Moscow university and worked in Moscow for many years before “downshifting”. I understood her word exactly. She was teaching English at the university in Sukhumi and helping Max and the Minister try to perform feats of foreign affairs in a country that no other country recognized.
But now the challenge I had was to find local foods at the market that would pair well with Icewines. They couldn’t be cooked and so had to be raw or pre-cooked and assembled shortly before the tasting. I’m used to working with a chef for such things but today all the presentation and preparation would be done by the common denominator, me.
Abkhazia uses no pesticides, herbicides or unnatural fertilizers. The entire country is organic. The country has been cut off from the world since 1992 so Abkhazia has been spared from genetic engineering of its produce. The water that comes down from the mountains is the purest in the world. The local vegetables and fruits that I found in the market are the freshest and tastiest I have ever encountered. But they weren’t what I was used to! What an adventure!
All afternoon I and my new friend trotted around the Sukhumi market. I was literally a kid in a candy story tasting cheeses, breads, fruits, and some unknown concoctions that I was so happy to find. She introduced me to her mother’s friends who tended the market stands. She patiently answered all my naive questions, and in the end we had a couple of bags of fabulous foods to try with Icewines.
On the Eastern shores of the Black Sea, Lavash is a wonderful white bread that rises a bit into a fabulous loaf. Closer to Arabia, it would be a completely flat bread that does not rise, but in these parts, it rises just enough to make it a bread, not crackers, and to have the ability to hold taste and smell in the bread. Khachipuri is a cheese bread. If we were making cheese bread in North America, we might fold feta and ricotta into bread dough and bake. All over the Causasus Mountains the recipe for Khachipuri changes based on what is available locally.
Suluguni cheese is a wonderful smoked cheese. I had a brief translation problem when I asked what another kind of cheese was. My friend stopped and tried hard to describe the animal it came with. It had long horns. The animal’s hair was long and grey. It was a big animal. Could it be that I was pairing Icewine with yak cheese? It was heavy and salty and perfectly paired with Riesling.
Lana arranged in Russian with the taxi driver to stop at a bakery on the way to UNOMIG. As I walked into the bakery, they were pulling the Lavash out of the oven and handed it to me. I know I have never in my life ridden in such a lovely smelling taxi.
As I passed through the guardhouse at the gates the guards looked at me. I held my bags up and said, “I’m taking booze to Teddy”. They passed me through immediately.
Winetastings are winetastings. The staid ones begin with a brief history of why the Niagara Peninsula creates a perfect microclimate for Icewine. We talk about the harvest happening in the dead of night in the bitter cold and why that is important for making great Icewines. Then we begin to sample, and talk about colour, nose, taste and finish like all wines, interspersing the pours with anecdotes and tidbits about the wineries represented there.
The Dan Aykroyd Icewine was appreciated, proving that Dan is a Canadian known pretty well around the world. There was a moment of silent reverence when the cork on the $400 bottle of Pillitteri Shiraz was eased out and carefully poured around. I got to retell the story of Allan and Brian Schmidt taking their The Vineland Estates Icewine to the magnetic north pole.
As I poured the Reif Icewine, the Australian fellow asked, “Did you stomp these grapes with your own feet?” Now Icewine tastings are usually formal, staid events where one tries to present the wine in a structured and studied manner. His question, and my response, “Yes I did, but after a while I got tired and sat down on them” signaled the end of any formality and the event evolved into a casual cocktail party.
I’m pretty proud of being Canadian. We have a great country. I was pretty proud and pleasantly surprised to meet the Canadian representative in UNOMIG at the end of the wine tasting. I didn’t know that this fellow was the Canadian as he wasn’t wearing a uniform flag patch. Teddy had to introduce us. He was a tall, very black man with a distinct Ethiopian ethnic background. He had immigrated to Canada, and then went back out into the world as Canada’s representative. On many levels, I was proud to meet him. What does a Canadian look like?
Yesterday, July 15, 2009 the UNOMIG mission left Abkahzia. Russia had vetoed an extension and has moved troops into Akbhazia at the invitation of the Akbhazian leaders. This includes an air base, upgrades to road, sea and rail infrastructure and a permanent presence of Russian troops to face the presence of Georgian troops on the southern border, supported by American troops. The USS New York was recently in Poti, Georgia. The New York is one of America’s newest warships. It is packed to the gunnels with electronics and her mission is electronic information gathering. The cold war is not over.
The good news is that Abkhazia needs the infrastructure, the jobs, and the hard currency that will be spent, and perhaps a different bunch of guys with guns on the border will bring a stronger version of peace. The bad news is that there are still guns pointed at guns, and this area will be a political football between east and west for some time to come.
Max is taking me for a tour of the main Sukhumi waterfront. For me this means a stroll along a closed road with a tropical park on the one side and a curious collection of buildings on the other.
The buildings go from the fresh and shiny Ritsa hotel to the burned out shell of the Hotel Abkhazia which stands in glorious ruins as a reminder of the bloody 1992 war that gave the Abkhazians freedom from Georgia on one hand and the armed peace that created this gilded cage which trapped the Abkhazians in and the rest of the world out.
It is ironic that the Hotel Akbhazia is a ruinous symbol of the war but I was told it actually burned down a couple of years before the war.
There are a few restaurants in the few blocks that we stroll. I get the impression that a strange face here would be noticed among the locals pretty quickly. Elderly men play chess and backgammon near the large blue pavilion where I had gotten a superb cup of coffee earlier in the day.
The shadows of the palm trees grow longer over the road and reach towards the buildings. Out on the water, the massive piers that just into the Black Sea begin to turn orange. One has small black figures moving about the restaurant perched over Sukhumi Bay. The other is deserted except for a lone fisherman hopefully perched like a shadow puppet over his potential dinner.
As we pass an outdoor patio, Max stops to talk to two people who were clearly from the outside world. After weeks of being submerged in
Russian language that was just now becoming a melodic sound, it was a plunge in cold water to hear Teddy’s friendly booming Irish lilt, and his friend, when he made a less garrulous introduction, spoke in a Macedonian accent. Something is up!
Max introduced us. Teddy and his friend were part of the United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG) whose mission as unarmed observers was to represent the United Nations in maintaining the peace between Georgia and Abkhazia. They were a part of a multinational team that took long walks in the woods which had once been described as one of the most heavily mined area in the world looking for signs of aggression. This was Teddy’s realm, hospitality. In the Caucasus, one of the most hospitable bunches of people in the world, the Irishman was able to come out large and more hospitable. I was no longer in Abkhazia when I accepted his invitation to sit down at the table. I was now in Teddy’s world.
For the next couple of hours, we talked all over the world, and I got to eat some amazing cheeses, fabulous fish, and some passable wines that were made superb by the company, the conversation, and the setting sun in this gilded cage called Abkhazia.
“The morning shadows are long and the waterfront park is slowly filling with locals, chatting over Turkish coffee and beginning their day with the casual, comfortable chatter in a style that only years of hunching over a chessboard or backgammon board in mortal combat with close friends can bring.
“I am exhausted. It has been an impossibly long night of love making. Spring has brought out orgiastic behaviours. Multiple partners, and the unabashed screams born of lust drowns out the complaints until at last, there is nothing to do but collapse in exhaustion.
“The dogs of Sukhumi are having far more fun than I am.”
Max asked me what I was always writing in my notebook and I showed him this page. He frowned until the last sentence and then grinned wryly.
I am not here to sell Icewine. I am here to drink in this place called Abkhazia.
It is my second day in Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhazia. There is no shiny tourist area. There are few tourists in Sukhumi, unlike the northern towns of Pitsunda and Gagra where Russian tourists still come to enjoy the beaches in dozens when before the war they came in the thousands. I am walking along a street and peeking into shops. The cars and busses that go by are all ancient and the people are tired, old, and friendly. I am peering at them and am self conscious about staring, but I’m fascinated.
In Toronto I would probably have walked right by Anna, sadly, treating her like we treat so many homeless looking folks. In Sukhumi, things are different, and I smile at everyone. Anna is sitting on a block of wood. Her clothes are old and tired and she is probably younger than the 60 years I give her. She has arranged a small flat box with bunches of cilantro and another herb I don’t recognize. Her belongings, I realize, are placed in bags on a windowsill behind her.
We make eye contact and I say hello. Everyone on this street that I have approached has spoken only Russian, or Abkhazian, or perhaps other languages, but certainly no English. I expected that the world would understand a simple ‘hello’ in English and that Anna would nod, and perhaps smile, and I would walk on.
Her face brightens and she says, “You speak English!” I’m sure my smile got wider and and I replied, “Yes” I stuck out my hand. “My name is Phil and I’m from Canada”.
“I am Anna”
Over the next few minutes I felt my discomfort in looking down at this affable lady who chatted so intimately dissipate. Anna, she told me studied English and Russian literature in university in Moscow and then taught it for some years, “but look at me now!” A lady walked by between us and stopped to ask about the cilantro. They exchanged a few words and the lady abruptly walked off. Anna surprised me with, “I don’t like those people”. Then her English deteriorated as the emotion rose in her voice. I think that she told me that “those people come down here and move around like they own the place.”
“They produce nothing, and contribute nothing. They are terrible.” I wanted to continue talking with her but that initial connection was broken by her emotional explanation. I wanted to ask her if I could buy her coffee, or lunch and learn from her, but I also feared that it would be taken as charity and I might become one of ‘those people’ in her next story. I also wanted to take her picture but I felt that I had already delved into her private life enough. The picture was not important.
About a half hour later I came back and the block of wood was sitting empty on the sidewalk and Anna’s bags were still on the window sill, but Anna was gone.
I never found out who “they” were.
Abkhazia is a difficult place to write about, but I have to describe Abkhazia before I can write about some of the adventures and people I met down there and how it connects to Icewine. Context is so much more important.
Abkhazia is a land sandwiched between Russia and Georgia on the north and south, and the Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountains to the east and west.
My innocuous description of where Abkhazia is located is enough to start a fight in many parts of Russia and Georgia. I used the word ‘land’. It would cause dispute to call Abkhazia a country, or in some circles to not call it a country.
As of today, only four countries recognize Abkhazia as a country so that term is in dispute. The Georgian interests claim that Abkhazia is a part of Georgia that broke away in a bloody conflict in 1991 and is held by rebels. Only the 3000 or so Russian peacekeeping troops standing on the southern border for the last 18 years have kept Georgia from physically reclaiming the territory. Georgians would argue that Abkhazia is not bordered by Georgia in the south, but is rather a province in northern Georgia. Similar arguments are made around South Ossetia, where the bulk of the 2008 Georgian-Russian war was fought.
After the 1991 war over 200,000 ethnic Georgians fled Abkhazia, leaving approximately 80,000 ethnic Abkhazians in control. Since then, Abkhazia has been blockaded by politics, economics, and geography. Abkhazia’s only significant trading partners are Russia which maintained a leaky border on the north, and Turkey, who has some mining interests and can ship across the Black Sea.
There are many gorillas in the room but the biggest one seems to be about the displaced Georgians. How does a democratic country of perhaps 80,000 people repatriate 200,000 people and not lose effective control of their country? How do they address the repatriation of the assets that the Georgians lost when they were forced to flee? What is ‘right’?
It is not an uncommon problem. The Soviet Union and Imperial Russia has had a long tradition of relocating large numbers of people, often in the middle of the night and usually at gunpoint, and there have been many such relocations in the region.
The news media distorts our North American view of Abkhazia. America sides with Georgia which sets up little Abkhazia and South Ossetia smack in the middle of the supposedly dead cold war. Over the last few years, various American news agencies have described Akbhazia as a muslim hotbed of terrorism. In fact, over 80% of the people in Akbhazia are Orthodox Christians. I am sure that distortions happen on the Russian side as well, but I don’t read Russian so I can’t point at it.
Ultimately, I believe that who is ‘right’ depends on how far you want to go back to establish those rights, which effectively means that to outsiders like me, there is no ‘right’. There sure have been a lot of wrongs!
So what remains are shadows of the past: Dark memories and confusions and impossible loyalties to lands where one grew up but cannot live and loyalties to lands where one lives under constant threat. The world only knows the simplest of these stories as told in media headlines and sound bites.
The first thing you notice when you meet people from the Caucasus is that they are incredibly hospitable. They may be Circassian, Abkhazian, or Georgian or a hundred other ethnicities in the area and perhaps not get along so well, but once they recognize you as a guest, you can relax and enjoy discovering your hosts and delight in the history, culture and friendship.
I wanted to describe Abkhazia in fairly objective terms. It will form a framework for all of the anecdotes and tales that come from my visits in and around Abkhazia.
I loved the land and the people, both in Akbhazia and those I met who were displaced. If you can look beyond the bullet holes in the walls, or peer back through time to see the glorious parks and architecture or stroll around and meet people, it makes it easier to ignore the ‘gorillas in the corner’ that over time will have to be addressed or once more fought over.
The food is the freshest I have ever enjoyed. The water runs pure from the mountains. If ever a land deserved peace and reconciliation, Abkhazia does.