Chris Smith’s blog

When war between Russia and its tiny neighbor, Georgia, broke out last summer, you’d be forgiven for thinking it came out of nowhere, a fully formed international crisis. Georgia, after all, is a long way away from the United States and, all belligerent campaign posturing aside, just isn’t that high on people’s radar.

That’s a shame, because Georgia is one of the most interesting places on the planet. I learned a bit about the place on a reporting trip back in 2004 (stories here and here, a few photos here). Besides the country’s natural beauty–banana trees on the subtropical coast, snowcapped mountains and lush valleys in the interior–Georgia hosts two on-again, off-again civil wars; near-constant meddling from its former imperial overlord, Russia; an oil pipeline that puts it on the world strategic map; and an American-educated president who chews his tie when the cameras are rolling. It also has some of the world’s most lunatic drivers. (In particular, I’m thinking of a high-speed midnight tow, via a frayed old rope, down a winding mountain road, by a carload of drunks. We lived, so I can laugh.)

One more important thing to know about Georgia: it makes some damn good wine. I’m happy to report that the new issue of San Francisco magazine has a short piece of mine (“From Georgia, with love”) on a local wine entrepreneur named Chris Terrell. Like me, Terrell fell in love with the place when he visited, and he recently launched a Georgian wine importing business here in the city. Wine, you must understand, is serious business in Georgia.

We huddle around a small table in a wood-paneled restaurant in Tbilisi’s old town, the detritus of a supra, or feast, surrounding us. Plates of eggplant, spare ribs, and Georgian pastries litter the table. A waitress brings jug after jug of strong, red Georgian wine, a variety known as Saperavi – literally, “pigment,” for its staining effect on the teeth and lips. Shota, a rugby-playing 28-year-old who sells mineral water for a living, raises his glass in a toast to “Mother Georgia.”

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By tradition, no one drinks wine without making a toast. The toasts are elaborate affairs — mini-speeches, really — and fall into definable categories: There are toasts to parents, to siblings, to the dead, to love and to peace, global and local. Nationalist toasts like Shota’s are common, too, and understandably so: In a place with this much history and this much pain, the past is very much alive.

All of that is just a roundabout way of saying I’m pleased to offer up something Georgia-related that isn’t about war. Because the war reporting isn’t going away anytime soon. I still remember sitting around a cafe table in Tbilisi with a refugee from one of those civil wars, an ethnic Georgian whose family was run out of South Ossetia during the initial conflict in the early 1990s. He was an engineering student, a 20-year-old who grew up during the worst of the fighting–he told us that things got so bad at one point that militiamen stole his toys–and he planned to retake his family’s home from the Ossetians who commandeered it. As we talked, a little boy in head-to-toe camouflage stalked the cafe tables with an M-16. The gun made a “clack-clack-clack” sound, sparks jumping from its mouth.