Finally, the tutorial you have all been waiting for

Hello again out there in the blogosphere. Here it is what you have all been waiting for, a step by step tutorial on how to make wine, Georgian Style. We know that this will make you, the public feel, as though we are not suffering Peace Corps volunteers and that is true, but let me remind you just in case you feel like this may be too easy and everyone could do it, we did have to walk through a flock of chickens ( yes, Moe is still alive) and turkeys to get to the next door neighbor's house and the turkeys are in the middle of some fall dancing ritual that seems dangerous. So really we risked our personal safety to bring you this entry.
Step One: Setting: Lazy Sunday Afternoon, Julien and Martha are just setting out for a much needed brisk walk to burn off some of the new winter time food staples of fried potatoes and white bread with butter. But lo, we are stopped by Natia (pictured left with Martha doing what she does best, explaining something, Martha is also doing what she does best listening to long explaination of something in Georgian, and then translating for Julien "it's got something to do with the wine; I think you put some wine in there for a while"), our super awesome next door neighbor and the daughter of our adopted host grandma and grandpa (they are of no relation to our host family, but I see them a lot more often then our real host grandma and grandpa, so they have filled in nicely and they are great in every way). So step one: be interrupted in exercise you don’t really want to do anyway by an invitation to spend time with great people.

Step Two: Watch host Grandma make fresh bread in a thing called a torna which is a kiln like apparatus. Delicious.

Step Three: Sit down at outside table in the garden, speak about the glory that is Fall in Imereti (the region in which we currently reside) and eat bread right out of the oven that is so hot that you can barely touch it with fresh made cheese from the cow that is quietly mooing in the cow shed behind the bread making building and drinking wine in various stages of readiness from fresh juice to ten day old red.
Step Four: Be force fed delicious fresh made khachapuri (cheese bread) until you are going to burst at the seams.

Step Five: Waddle over to wine making building, which is an open air building that currently has a clay soil covered floor with six small mounds of soil. There is a small table which is covered with grapes and more food in case you worked up an appetite in the 20 feet from the table to the marani wine making room.

Step Six: Watch as host Grandpa climbs over a thing that looks like a large cement bathtub that is filled with grapes and removes his shoes and socks, this is where traditionally host grandpa would just step into the vat of grapes, but all those stems and seeds don’t seem like they would be comfortable on feet that are not allowed to set foot on the ground with out shoes (more on the health implications of going barefoot in a later post), so host grandpa put on clean rubber boots. Then the fun begins. Stomp, stomp, stomp. As host grandpa stomps, the juice from the grapes courses down the basin to the end where there is a hole and out into a porcelain catch basin.

Step Seven: Martha and Julien do the only work that they are allowed to do all day and like good Georgians, Natia and Host Grandpa ask constantly whether we are tired from our labors. What is this fatigue inducing work? We are to scoop the juice from the basin into a bucket (See Julien's work), which Natia then empties into a larger drum for future movement. It was such a beautiful sight and the juice was very good, so I imagine the wine will be very good.

Step Eight: After the juice is all collected it gets moved into the clay holding vessels (See picture, this is a much smaller version of the vessels that are in the ground which hold between 50 and 100 gallons each) which are in the floor of the marani, under the ground, to maintain a constant temperature. These clay vessels are then covered with a round piece of wood and a piece of plastic or burlap and a pipe is put in the top for ventilation and a plant piece is put in the top to keep bugs out and then the opening is covered with soil, hence the little mounds of soil on the floor. Here the juice stays for a specific period of time depending on the type of grape. Then it is scooped out and stored in any vessel you can find, from fancy clay pitchers to plastic Fanta bottles.
I must say here the wine ranges wildly in quality. We have had some really good wine and some wine that made us think that perhaps the 5,000 years of practice had not aided in refining the process. Everybody makes wine. I really have not met one person who did not grow grapes and make wine of some sort. Even apartment dwellers grow grapes, we have many times seen serpentine vines that were forced to grow from the flower bed and up several stories to the balcony of an apartment. No one seems to sell their wine, so I think that it is simply a labor of love; the love of making and drinking wine and continuing a long held tradition that is passed down from one generation to the next. Sometimes the wine is literally passed down from one generation to the next because some of the vines are up to and over 100 years old and some of the grape varieties are 100s if not 1000s of years old. It is a lovely activity to behold and maybe one of these days we can convince someone that we can actually do some of the work and we’ll be allowed to do the squishing ourselves, but until then you will have to take our second-hand word for it.