An Amateur Discovers Georgian Wine - Pheasant's Tears Saperavi

I bought an Argentinian Malbec the day before and had two bottles of Il Censo’s 2012 Praruar chilling in the refrigerator. But this label promised woody tannins mellowed in clay pots. Seduced like a kid by the December Toys R Us catalog, I sprinted to the checkout.

My seducer was a Georgian wine, specifically Pheasant’s Tears Saperavi, which seemed as rare as a crisp autumn morning. You can swing by your local bar for a Spanish Rioja but ask for something from Georgia and the bartender is more likely to serve you sickly-sweet sweet tea. That’s a shame because Georgia has been producing wine since roughly 4000 BC. Back then, Georgians poured their fresh-pressed grape juice into large amphorae, called qvevri (kwev-ree), and buried them underground to ferment for up to 50 years. Although modern production techniques now dominate, several producers continue to age their wines in the traditional manner. UNESCO deemed this process an intangible cultural heritage in 2013.

But say your bartender doesn’t bat an eyelash when you request Georgian wine. Instead, they offer you a choice between Tavkveri or Mtsvani — if you’re okay with a white wine this evening, that is. Rather than be surprised, you could ask if they had a Shavkapito or even a Rkatsiteli (one of the oldest grapes on earth!). Still, these indigenous varietals offer only a small sip of Georgian wine culture.

If you came to my house that Sunday, we’d have taken our first sip. First I’d apologize for the too-small glass (no chance of aerating the wine). But we’d stick our noses in anyway and inhale the wood like we were supposed to. I also detected alcohol-spiked Ribena or prune juice (not that I’d admit to the latter). You’d laugh and then describe a head of oak and a retro-aroma of black pepper. Who’s laughing now?

Then we’d drink. You’d snigger again when I said the wood smell was definitely oak. But that wouldn’t stop me from telling you how this oak got cloaked under a velvet parachute of blackcurrant and had the texture of fruit punch left out of the fridge overnight, but without the cloying aftertaste. I knew it sounded ridiculous but it felt true. You were no better. You described an inky violet cloud that overshadowed a bunch of margiolds crossing the Black Sea on a raft made from smoked cedar!

We sipped through half the bottle revising our descriptions along the way. If someone barged in on us, they’d have cringed and begged for a Coors Lite. But we’d keep drinking, pleased that we could glimpse the truth of Pheasant’s Tears Saperavi and, with it, Georgian culture.

How to make a crayfish and rocket sandwich, American style

If you lined up Pret-A-Manger’s worldwide outlets, they’d resemble a Twinkie production line, each one eerily identical including the plastic aroma. But unlike Twinkies, which taste just as bland purchased from Selfridges as when snagged from a Brooklyn bodega, the food at Pret varies. Take their crayfish and rocket sandwich. I discovered it while living in London and soon found it in refrigerator cases everywhere from Morrison’s to Marks & Spencers. Don’t look for it in US sandwich cases, just settle for the strangely saccharine spicy shrimp and cilantro wrap. Crayfish and rocket’s popularity in the UK is as understandable as its absence in the US is baffling. Crammed full of mini-chewy shrimp, peppery arugula (rocket), and a thick smear of mayonnaise, the sandwich removes its crusts when showing up for a sophisticated tea-time, then dons a paper box for an al-desko lunch (just be sure to brush the crumbs off your keyboard). In England, most cafes will use a soft granary bread, but I enjoy the structure a nubbly whole-grain loaf provides. That way more crayfish end up in your mouth than on your pants.

Crayfish and Rocket Sandwich

Ingredients:

• 2 slices of medium-thick wholegrain sandwich bread, untoasted
• 1 tablespoon Greek yogurt
• 4 shrimp, peeled and cooked
• ¼ cup arugula, roughly chopped
• Black pepper

Place your sliced bread on a buttering or cutting board. Spread one slice with greek yogurt in an even layer, just to the edges of the crust.

Chop the shrimp into small cubes, about the size and shape of your finger nail. You want them small enough to fit inside the bread without creating lumps, but not be so small that they become a squishy mess. Scatter them in an even layer over the slice of bread with yogurt. Season with a generous grind of pepper.

Cover the shrimp with the chopped arugula and pat down. Place the remaining slice of bread on top and press down gently so the layers together hold together. You can cut it on the diagonal like they do at sandwich chains, or you can just eat. I prefer the latter.

Grand Hotel and Italy's Post-War Cineromanzi Magazines

Don’t let the Elena Ferrante frenzy fool you: Italians are voracious image consumers. This isn’t a product of television or the Internet or of poor journalism. The Italian penchant for visual media has a long history with diverse products that demonstrate a unique interpretation of popular culture. My favorite product? The 1950s picture magazine.

During the years following World War II, Italians devoured magazines that adapted Hollywood films into serialized photo montages. The comic-style stories featured Italian actors chosen for their resemblance to American stars. People who couldn’t afford to see the latest release at the cinema, could buy the adaption instead and spend hours perusing the annotated screenshots and speech bubbles. Italian picture magazines weren’t a limited phenomenon of cheap entertainment, but a clever way for media to appropriate the symbolize of modern, American culture.

Grand Hotel was one of the most loved of these fotoromanzi, picture novels. Each week Italian women — and men, if we believe the letters that published in the front — indulged in a new chapter of a popular story. Similar to how television cut cinematic plots into pieces for private viewing, Grand Hotel extended a movie’s lifespan to several weeks and prized the role of personal fantasy. Rather than watching a screen with a group in a dark room, the fotoromanzo lets the reader meanders through the story at their own pace, focusing on the panels, styles, and quotes that stoke their imagination. The picture novel promises personal escape.

Grand Hotel continues to be published, but as a tabloid, having lost film adaptions in the 1970s and reduced picture-stories in the 1960s. While tabloids could be seen as the contemporary equivalent of the Hollywood-inspired cineromanzi — they both scrutinize celebrity — the original Grand Hotel presented fame as a story rather than as an aspiration. Tabloids display celebrities’ daily lives. Fotoromanzi presented celebrity in stories. If film stars once seemed as untouchable as actual stars, Western society’s increased wealth renders stardom’s cars, clothing, and cash more accessible. Today celebrities must be perfect people as well as perfect characters because they reflect contemporary goals. All Grand Hotel stars had to do was fuel fantasy.

The need for fantasy endures. And Italian readers — perhaps having been brought up in a culture where it’s not strange to see an adult reading a comic in public — seem to crave them more than most. Although photo-driven periodicals such as Life and Picture Post appeared in the US and UK during this era, the range of options and continued popularity of image-heavy publications in Italy remains unique. From Topolino (Mickey Mouse comics generated as a franchise within the country) to Diabolik (a detective comic for adults), illustrated magazines are sold at every edicola, or news kiosk. Italy’s post-war picture press speaks to a certain style of imagination that epitomized an epoch, but also extends throughout the country, demonstrating a desire to immerse oneself into a visual fantasy on a personal level. 

Soho Square and Lessons in Public-Private Urban Spaces

Soho Square is the untended child of London’s green spaces. It is not well-manicured like Russell Square, nor illustrious like Berkeley Square. When the Earl of Macclesfield built Soho Square in 1681, it was London’s first garden piazza. Today people come to sit and read and toast to Friday with cheap cava and challenge their coworkers to ping pong. They come to gasp at the drunks and druggies and dead-beats who mill about as if a homing device lures them to the epicenter of once-raucous London. Soho Square exhibits the memory of London pseudo-grittiness.

But the Square’s scruffy appearance juxtaposes the high-street stores, boutiques and restaurants that draw people to Soho. You could be on Corso Como in Milan or Mott Street in Nolita. Some people aren’t content. In 2014, Stephen Fry and Tim Arnold began a campaign called ‘Save Soho’ to defend the neighborhood’s art scene from being priced out by Identikit shops and cafes. According to them, Soho means independent expression, creativity, and interaction. These days, however, urban grit lives there only before the street washers arrive on Sunday morning.

Yet some character remains in Soho Square.  Sanitation officers might wash the dirt from the street, but they won’t take it off your pants after you lounge in the patchy grass. The token bum might be three feet away. Combined with the phone conversation in French on your left and the sprinklers beating the grass to the right, Soho Square personifies weird Soho.

This is public space. This is the public realm. This is what makes London vibrant.

I recently attended a talk at the New York Public Library presenting Alex Garvin’s book What Makes a Great City. His answer: Shared spaces that develop the relationship between citizens and their city. These spaces encompass everything. They are the sidewalks and the subway platforms and the parks and the streets. In London they are the squares.

These garden squares haven’t always been open-access and their liberalization highlights how smart urbanization rendered London a modern world city. In the seventeenth century, green areas became popular as the population grew and wealthy citizens craved an escape from the chaos. Developers built houses along fenced-off parks, which residents of the surrounding townhouses could access only with a key. This elite model persisted for several hundred years until politicians realized that a disempowered artistocracy meant regular citizens should also benefit from squares. So far roughly two hundred have been turned into public-private urban green spaces, but many private ones remain. Nevertheless, this re-imagination of city space demonstrates London’s commitment to creating shared zones where all social classes can interact.

Garvin knows that he’s not revolutionizing urbanism by suggesting that a vibrant public realm equals a vibrant city. What he does instead is argue that urbanists should develop a vital atmosphere through a combination of public and private funds. It’s a complex argument with implications too technical to approach in this blog-post. There are indications that this model works, just look at Brooklyn Bridge Park, London’s Santander (previously Barclay) bike sharing scheme or Atlanta’s BeltLine. But the encroachment of private money in the public realm also qualifies free-access. Although Bryant Park currently offers a calendar of free events, they could erect gates and charge admission if they wanted to control their audience and boost funding. Garvin wants his reader to understand that cities need help to attract to a dynamic population, but the relationship between money and civic life remains negotiable.

Soho Square encapsulates this paradox. It attracts wealth and poverty. It attracts business and leisure. It attracts relaxation and work. But this peaceful co-existence is precarious. Although the area provides a place for people to meet, stronger policing could threaten diversity. Out pricing the surrounding area could promote sanitization. Every visitor has an individual reason for mucking up their jeans in Soho’s patchy lawn. We need to linger and observe to understand how cities can enable citizens to indulge in their urban fantasies together.