I learned to love this word in Kakheti, a region of eastern Georgia famed both for its wine and its tortured history of foreign invasion. The emphasis is on the first syllable and you speak the toast with feeling. After Abkhazia I travelled over to Kakheti by marshrutky, via Tbilisi.
I wanted to fill another gap in my knowledge of Georgia. In earlier travels I had missed the pretty town of Sighnaghi, a few kilometres before the Azerbaijan border. It is an engaging, hilly town, all cobbled streets and red-tiled roofs. My guide book is right β the town, perched high above a plain, has a very Italian feel. Somebody has had the daft idea of basing quad bikes smack in the middle of it, but the overall impression is still of a town in beautiful countryside, peaceful but plugged in to the wider world.
I found my guesthouse, which faced north with beguiling views of the plain below. Beyond, hidden in a heat haze, were the Caucasus.
My focus in Sighnaghi was to learn about Georgian wine, but first I had to attend to my health. There was no-one waiting and I walked straight into the surgery for a Russian-language consultation with a Georgian doctor. She said I had had food poisoning and gave me instructions on diet. The museum is something of a shrine to artist Niko Pirosmani It has 14 paintings by him, the biggest collection outside Tbilisi.
Posthumously, Pirosmani rose to fame in his native land but in his own lifetime he was poor and generally unknown. Even the location of his grave remains unknown. He was born in a Kakheti village to a family of peasants who owned a small vineyard and some of his art honoured the life of the peasant and the grape harvest.
