The world’s next great food destination is not where you expect

The Telavi market is something of a throwback, almost a museum. The battered old Lada parked out the front speaks of Georgia’s long-gone Soviet history, while inside, the rows of fresh produce, local cheeses, pickled vegetables, and even big plastic bottles of homemade vodka look like they haven’t changed in centuries.

It’s busy here under the big corrugated iron roof, as you get the feeling it is every day.

Telavi Market… “almost a museum”.Credit: Alamy

Locals pick over the churchkhela, a Georgian specialty – long strings of walnuts coated in a thick, hardened paste made with grape juice, which hang in rows like shiny purple sausages. More still line up at the bakery, which churns out circular loaves of bread as fast as people can buy them.

It may not be immediately obvious, but this is the heartland of one of the world’s great gastronomic cultures. The produce around here will almost certainly be put to good use by the shoppers in an array of dishes that many outsiders will not have heard of, but will quickly grow to love.

Some of these vegetables will go on to be made into nigvziani badrijani, a classic Georgian appetiser of cooked eggplant slices rolled in thick walnut paste. The cheese will almost certainly become khachapuri, another local staple, thick dough stuffed with cheese. The meat might be minced and packed into khinkali, Georgia’s answer to the soupy xiao long bao dumplings of Shanghai, or Turkish manti.

Khinkali, Georgia’s answer to the soupy dumplings of Shanghai.Credit: iStock

There is very good food in this country. Georgia might not roll off the tongue in quite the same way as, say, Italy or Japan when it comes to naming the great food destinations of the world, but this is a nation with an incredibly long history of culinary excellence, and a strong modern culture keeping it alive.

But what do most of us know about Georgia before a visit? Probably very little. The country has a long and tattered past. “People ask me who has invaded Georgia,” a guide says to me at one point, “and I ask them, ‘Which century do you want to talk about?’” It also has a sometimes uncertain future, as the country’s leaders weigh its relationships with Russia and the European Union.

Yet Georgians consider themselves European, pointing out that their small nation, about the size of Ireland, sits on the edge of the Caucasus, where Europe ends and Asia begins.

Theirs is a country of great diversity, from those Caucasus peaks brushing the sky in the north, to the lush valleys of the centre, to the rainforests and Black Sea coast of the west.

The native language here is a one-off, related to no other. The Georgian alphabet is unique.

Food meets art on the streets of Tbilisi.

And Georgians love wine. This country might be home to the world’s oldest wine culture, with evidence having been discovered of wine production in Georgia stretching back 8000 years, to the neolithic period.

It doesn’t take long to appreciate just how widespread and important this winemaking culture is, either. On arrival in Georgia I check into my hotel in central Tbilisi, the capital, and immediately spot an apartment nearby with a gnarly old grape vine growing on the balcony, its branches and leaves cascading several storeys to the pavement below.

There’s a tradition of making your own wine here, rather than buying it from the experts; even those in the city find a way.

Jokolo… a classic dish.

Tbilisi these days, however, is also filled with wine bars peddling the country’s most cherished product. These are only a recent addition to the scene, and locals apparently scoffed when the first bars opened here in the last decade: who’s going to pay all that money for fancy wine when you’ve got perfectly good stuff at home?

Plenty of people, it turns out. Many of them tourists or Russian expats, but a good share of locals too.

One of my first ports of call on arrival is the best of those wine bars, Dadi, in Tbilisi’s modern centre. The wine list here is gigantic – 89 wines by the glass, by my count – and impossible to navigate unless you already know your tavkveri from your rkatsiteli, your saperavi from your mtsvane (Georgia’s unique wine culture includes the use of native grape varieties).

Fortunately, the staff at Dadi are friendly, informed and good with English, so before long I have a glass of Tchotiashvili mtsvane and a plate of local mountain cheese. This wine is made in the traditional Georgian style, the way it has been for millennia: white wine is fermented and aged with its skins in qvevri, egg-shaped earthenware pots that impart tannins to the wine and help give it its distinctive amber colour.

Simple perfection at Dadi wine bar in Tbilisi.

In the wrong hands this style can be overly funky and faulty, but this Tchotiashvili wine is incredibly good: textural, saline and complex.

Georgia, of course, isn’t flying completely under the radar as a food destination. I’m in the country to do Intrepid Travel’s Georgia Real Food Adventure, one of a series of specialist culinary expeditions that the company conducts throughout the world.

This is an eight-day journey around some of Georgia’s culinary hotspots, beginning and ending in Tbilisi, and calling through the Kakheti wine region, Telavi with its market, the isolated Pankisi Valley, and Gudauri, a town set high in the Caucasus in the country’s north.

Our first group meal in Tbilisi is a sign of things to come, a restaurant table heaving with share plates: that eggplant in walnut paste; a plate of pickled chillies, cucumbers, onions and local flower blossoms called jonjoli; a simple salad of tomatoes, cucumbers and mint; shkmeruli, a stew of chicken with garlic cream sauce; chashushuli, a rich beef-and-tomato stew; and the ubiquitous shoti, a traditional bread baked in a stone oven like a tandoor.

Classic Georgian salad.

To stare at a table full of food in Georgia is to peer into the country’s history. You can see ingredients and ideas here from the country’s many neighbours and historic invaders – Greeks, Romans, Mongols, Timurids, Persians, Armenians, Russians and more, though there are also plenty of unique, organic traditions that the Georgians are fiercely proud of. And they’re a nation of feeders.

“In Georgia, if there’s a plate that’s empty, it’s a problem,” a local will later tell me. “We have to fill it.”

The area around the city of Telavi is clearly a culinary hotspot, set in the heart of Kakheti, Georgia’s most important wine region. Our first stop here is at Gremi Bio Marani, an independent, biodynamic winemaker that opens its doors for tastings in the marani, the cellar in which qvevri are buried in the earth and the wine is aged.

This is the perfect place to appreciate the passion Georgians put into winemaking, not to mention the skill of its small-scale producers. It’s also a chance to sit down to a home-cooked meal: shoti bread, pickled jonjoli blossoms, eggplant with walnut, fresh cheese, and this time khachapuri, another icon of Georgian cuisine, a soft disc of bread stuffed with cheese and served piping hot.

Telavi has its market, thriving with colour and aroma. Here we try chacha, a homemade grape spirit known as marc in English, a boozy distillate much loved by locals.

We also visit Tsivis Kveli, a Telavi cheesemaker, to sample the full breadth of cheeses made in just this small part of the country – every region, we soon discover, has its own varieties.

And then we continue on to Jokolo, a tiny, remote village about an hour from Telavi, to discover the influence of ethnic Chechen culture on the food and the sense of committed hospitality in this little-visited area.

Here, Nazy Dakishvili runs a tiny guesthouse where she uses food, among other cultural touchstones, to welcome visitors and share experiences and improve the lives of the maligned ethnic minority of Chechens she proudly counts herself a part of.

This is another step back in time, a museum piece. It’s also as warming as a stew, as hearty as fresh bread. It’s a world you want to exist in.

THE DETAILS

TOUR
Intrepid Travel’s Georgia Real Food Adventure is an eight-day, seven-night journey with a focus on the nation’s cuisine and wine culture. The tour includes seven nights’ accommodation, 16 meals, entrance to some sights, and the services of a guide with a private vehicle. From $2396 a person, beginning and ending in Tbilisi. See intrepidtravel.com

FLY
Qatar Airways flies from major Australian ports to Tbilisi, via Doha. See qatarairways.com

The writer travelled as a guest of Intrepid Travel.