LO CHEES of GEORG

The LOST CHEESES of GEORGIA THIS NATION’S UNIQUE CHEESE CULTURE WAS FLAttENED BY DECADES OF INVASION AND OCCUPATION. BUT IN MOUNTAIN PAGE VILLAGES AND REMOTE VALLEYS, HANDMADE73 TRA- DITIONS ENDURE The LOST CHEESES of GEORGIA BY DAVID FARLEY PHOTOGRAPHS BY SIMON BAJADA U R E G V E A O S PAGE78 R G I A 73 Zurab CHKADUA the names might sound exotic, but imagine living in a world in which we had access only to Colby, Amer- WAS ACTING ican, Swiss, and provolone. In the past few years, though, Mikadze-Chikvaidze has helped introduce the people of her country to AS THE their lost cheese heritage, uncovering traditions that have been practiced in isolated mountain villages for generations, and bringing them to the masses. I had met Mikadze-Chikvaidze at a winery here in Geor- TAMADA, gia a few months earlier, where she told me about her mission and invited me to join her on a visit to some of these village cheesemakers. “Come,” she the toastmaster, for a traditional Georgian supra at said that day at the winery, waving her hand as if his house in Lakhamula village in the Svaneti region we were going to go just then. “I will give you a pre- of northwestern Georgia. The job is sort of like being view of what people will someday see: that Georgia both a pastor and a quarterback for a dinner party. is a great cheesemaking country.” He had just instructed us to raise our glasses and give thanks. “To our guests at the table,” he said, as we downed ample portions of amber wine in a single four months later, we were driving out of go. “We must also be grateful for this treasure God Tbilisi, the capital. Georgia is wedged in the Caucasus has given us.” He meant the cheese, which his wife, mountains between Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Ira Ansiani, makes in her kitchen, about 10 feet from and Russia, and our destination was Andriatsminda, where we were sitting. a Georgian village about 12 miles from the Turkish Calling cheese a God-given treasure did not feel border. After three hours of driving, we turned off even a little bit like hyperbole because this wasn’t any the main road and onto a steep, bumpy dirt path to ordinary cheese. Narchvi is a rich, creamy cow’s-milk the village, a jumble of rickety wooden houses cling- variety with a deeply funky aroma, a buttery texture, ing to the top of a mountain. a sweet initial flavor, and a lingering saline quality. Cheesemaker Galina Inasaridze, 65 years old, ush- It’s aged in wooden boxes for up to a year, which is ered us into her house. She had been busy folding when it takes on a sharp, nutty flavor. Ansiani might cheese into khinkali—doughy, golf-ball-size dumplings. be the only person in the country who still makes it. I stole a piece from her assembly line. It had the texture She had used it to prepare two pizza-size khacha- of aged parmigiano, complete with crunchy crystals, puri, cheese-filled breads that are a staple of Georgian but with a flavor reminiscent of a sharp cheddar. “This cuisine. One, which had a satisfying sour intensity, one is pashvis nagbiani kveli,” Mikadze-Chikvaidze featured year-old narchvi. The other had fresher said. It was a cow’s-milk cheese that had been aged narchvi spiked with hemp seeds, another half-for- for three months in the stomach of a goat. Khinkali gotten tradition in this corner of the country, which are usually meat-filled, but hers had only cheese, with gave the khachapuri a lovely crunch. an irresistibly creamy texture. Lakhamula was the last stop on my weeklong tour From left: While this particular cheese is rare in Georgia, it around the country with Ana Mikadze-Chikvaidze, Cheesemaker Ira wasn’t even the main reason Mikadze-Chikvaidze who is known in local food circles as the “mother of Ansiani milks a cow took me there. An hour later, we walked through the Georgian cheese.” Until recently, Georgians had recog- in her village of ramshackle village to Inasaridze’s nearby farm to nized only four “traditional” styles of cheese: semisoft Lakhamula before watch the laborious process of making a cheese called sulguni, briny imeruli, guda cheese (completely unre- sampling the curds tenili. After separating the curds from the whey, she lated, confusingly, to Dutch Gouda), and karkhunli, made from the milk. and her neighbors warmed the curds over a fire until which translates to “factory cheese.” To a foreigner, they congealed into a pliable mass. At this point, one credit 74 SAVEUR.COM GEORGIA of the women began moving the cheese around her Clockwise from above: A all the way up here,” she said. “So some of our cheeses hands with a confident pedaling motion, flipping feast of flatbreads, cheeses, were able to survive.” the thick ribbon in a spinning loop. She pulled and and chicken salad with cel- The four-and-half-century Turkish Ottoman stretched. She spun and spun as the loop got bigger ery and pomegranite at An- Empire fell in 1922, but the Soviets showed up that and thinner. After about seven minutes of stretch- siani’s home; large wheels of same year. “The socialist economy didn’t have room cheese aging; Salema Khan, ing and pedaling, she dunked the whole thing in cold for the cheese industry—at least, not small-batch, Ansiani’s mother (left), water, and it separated into little 3-foot-long strings stands with the “mother artisanal, aged cheese,” Mikadze-Chikvaidze said. reminiscent of thick bucatini noodles. She hung the of Georgian cheese,” Ana “Sulguni and imeruli were mass-produced and strings of cheese across a horizontal wooden beam, Mikadze-Chikvaidze. churned out the next day. It was all about feeding where they would rest until the next day, when she the people, not about savoring food. That was consid- would dip them in heavy cream and stuff into a small ered too bourgeois,” she said. “In the Soviet period, clay pot. At this point the cheese would be ready to and a decade or so after, there was the attitude that eat, or to age for up to a year. if it wasn’t for sale at the market, then it didn’t exist. “There is no other cheese like this in world,” It’s a very Soviet mentality. When I’d turn up in a Mikadze-Chikvaidze said. “And only Galina and village and ask about artisanal cheese, they’d stare her two neighbors know how to make it.” She then at me blankly and then point me to the supermarket rattled off the names of some restaurants in Tbilisi to get some sulguni or guda. People were afraid of that were newly serving it. being punished for making something that wasn’t Inasaridze told me that the remote location of her within the system.” village was the only reason tenili existed at all. “The After the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1991, indepen- Turks occupied this region for centuries. They erased dence came to Georgia. So did a lot of uncertainty, some aspects of our culture, but they never made it poverty, and corruption—Georgians call the decade 75 the “dark ’90s.” Unexpectedly, around the turn heard of it. They said I was crazy. But just before Above: An assistant at of the millennium, the country’s wine indus- I was ready to give up, one guy said to me that cheesemaker Galina try took a turn toward the artisanal. Wine, like my only hope was to find one of the Adjaruli Inasaridze’s home pulls cheese, had languished under the Soviets, and communities that had been relocated after the hot Meskhetian khacha- winemakers continued producing mostly rotgut big 1989 landslide that took out a few villages puri from the stone hearth. Below: Tenili, a cheese made through the ’90s. But a growing scene of wine- there.” She paused. “So that’s this place,” point- by stretching pliable curds makers has returned returned to the ancient ing to a cluster of two-story detached houses in into thin ribbons. tradition of carefully aging the wine in below- the middle of the Disveli Plateau. ground clay amphorae. Today many Georgian Here we met Meri Makaharadze, the head bottles are sought after by natural-wine fans of a six-woman cheesemaking co-op called the around the world—the kind of thing that pops Disveli Female Cooperation. They make and sell up at Los Angeles grain bowl places and Pari- the well-known types such as sulguni, but we sian neo-bistros. were there for their shushvela. Makaharadze’s This was the model Mikadze-Chikvaidze had entire village, Tsablana, was destroyed by the in mind when she founded an annual cheese fes- 1989 landslide and the government relocated tival in 2010. One year later, she set up a cheese most of the residents here, about 250 miles east. shop in Tbilisi, the first of its kind in the country, The people still speak with an Adjaruli accent and five years after that she opened a small work- and eat traditional foods. Case in point: Within shop outside of town where she produces some moments of entering her home, we were greeted of these old-fashioned cheeses herself. Now there with an Adjaruli-style khachapuri, are a handful of shops selling handmade cheeses along with sinori, balls of bread in the capital, and an upscale supermarket chain rolled up around cheese and doused called Good Will has begun to stock them as well.

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