As we negotiated the serpentine highway, a cliff fell away to our right; there were no guardrails. I felt a thrill—whether from vertigo or from my sudden realization that the car had no windshield wipers. When we reached the Gombori Pass, the sky suddenly darkened, and within minutes we were engulfed in an intense alpine snowstorm. What was I doing here?
Halfway around the world from the land of peach-tree blossoms and Coca-Cola lies another, more beguiling, Georgia. Here, at the crossroads of East and West, Jason sought the Golden Fleece and discovered instead the enchanting Medea, with her sorceress’s knowledge of herbs. Here the wine grape was born and fermented into ghvino. And here the rich Georgian soil produces lush meadows for grazing and all manner of tea, spices, vegetables, and fruits, including aromatic feijoas from the Black Sea coast and, yes, even peaches—the golden fruit of Stalin’s hometown, Gori, is especially prized. For more than 2,000 years, this small country has attracted merchants, travelers, and invaders who coveted the wealth of her land.
It’s attracted me, as well. I’ve been coming to Georgia for more than 20 years. But until last winter, I’d never tried to make the journey to Alvani, a remote village known for making the best tushuri—one of the world’s great sheep’s-milk cheeses. Georgians are passionate about their local cheeses, which reflect the country’s wild nature. In Tbilisi, the capital city, peasant women come to the Central Market clad in black, their gold teeth gleaming, to sell rounds of the popular sulguni, a creamy cow’s-milk cheese that finds its way into countless dishes, from khachapuri, Georgia’s signature bread oozing melted butter and cheese, to elarji, hot grits beaten with cheese into a rich, molten mass. In contrast, fierce-looking mountaineers in conical sheepskin hats offer slabs of the sharp tushuri from the highlands, which is best eaten plain with a loaf of bread still warm from the toné, a tandoor-like Georgian oven. And at Tbilisi’s central marketplace, this cheese commands Dean & DeLuca prices. Tasting tushuri at its source had become my own personal quest.
Like the Golden Fleece, tushuri is hard to find, especially in midwinter. Enlisting the aid of my friend Zaliko was the easy part. “No problem,” he said when I called. An archaeologist and avid mountain climber, he loves any chance to escape the city—the farther afield, the better. Right away he agreed to take me to Alvani and, to prepare me for the visit, put me in touch with his old friend Georgi Tsotsanidze, an Alvani native who gave me a crash course in cheese production. We met for lunch at an old-fashioned tavern in Tbilisi and were whisked into a small private room, away from the smoke and the boisterous crowd in the main dining room. Between mouthfuls of spicy beef soup, leek and walnut purée, and kidney beans seasoned with dill, cilantro, and plum sauce, Georgi spoke lyrically of the alpine pastures of Tusheti, the wild blueberries, currants, and raspberries, the field mushrooms, and the aromatic herbs that lend subtle flavor to the sheep’s milk.
He told me how tushuri gets its distinctive mottled texture and sharp, briny taste from the guda, the sheepskin in which it is aged. The guda is prepared by shearing the wool close to the skin, leaving it less than half an inch in length. Then the sheep is slaughtered and its skin removed in one piece. After being washed and then dried in the sun, the neck and three of the leg openings are tied shut with hemp, and the skin is turned inside out so that the wool lines the inside. Next, five or six large canvas bags of freshly made cheese are layered with rock salt inside the skin. The cheesemaker then blows into the remaining leg opening to inflate the guda like a balloon, ties the last opening shut, and leaves the cheese to ripen in salt for three to four weeks. I couldn’t wait to see the process for myself.
A few days later, Zaliko and I set off early in the half-light of a January morning. Tbilisi stood silent and dark—electricity is spotty and sometimes nonexistent. After 70 years of Soviet misrule, Georgia’s infrastructure is a shambles, often quite literally, with walls collapsing and roads caving in. So I wasn’t surprised to see Zaliko drive up with a miner’s lantern strapped to his forehead.
We stopped at a roadside stand to buy provisions: loaves of hot bread, church-khela (sausage-shaped confections of grape juice and nuts), and chacha (Georgian moonshine made from grapes). I would have preferred some of the local Kakhetian wine, made by fermenting grape juice, skins, stems, and seeds for several months in large red clay amphoras. The result is an aromatic amber wine so rich in vitamins that Georgians swear by its curative properties. But chacha won the day. Zaliko was in high spirits. He poured the moonshine from the seller’s jug into recycled plastic liter bottles he’d had the foresight to bring along.
Like Jason himself, my friend Zaliko is not easily daunted. “No problem,” he told me as I pored over a road map, hesitant about navigating the Caucasus Mountains in mid-January, especially with the war in Chechnya only 100 miles away. The temperature dropped as we climbed the highway north from Tbilisi, but the presence of fresh, homemade provisions reassured me.
Then, on the gombori pass, the snowstorm began. The car began to skid—no snow tires. “No problem,” said Zaliko, continuing his hair-raising account of one of his Pamir expeditions. I reminded myself that it is precisely this devil-may-care attitude that keeps me returning to Georgia, but as the car failed to gain traction on the incline and slowly slid to the very edge of the roadside, Georgian capriciousness no longer seemed so charming. A gaggle of schoolboys materialized from the swirling snow and, gleeful at our misadventure, pushed the car back onto the crumbling road. So we inched along, determined to reach Alvani. But four hours and three spinouts later, even the intrepid Zaliko had to admit defeat. I returned to Tbilisi without my Golden Fleece and decided in stead to seek out my own Medea with a sorceress’s knowledge of herbs. I went to see my old friend Gulisa.
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