Nothing better than a platter of khashlama after meeting a renegade Kakhetian tornado
It took the tornado fifteen minutes to hit us from the moment it first appeared. We had just come down the Abano pass from Tusheti on the perilous high-wire referred to as a “road” and were feeling quite secure on flat land. You guys hungry or do you want to see Alaverdi, the holiest place in Kakheti? We'll have the best khashlama afterwards. Sure! We parked in the lot next to the Badagoni cafe, across the street from Alaverdi Monastery, when anti-hail rockets burst into an approaching mass of storm clouds.
“What are those?” our guests asked.
Most everyone in Kakheti makes a living someway connected to the wine industry and hail storms destroy vineyards, wreck livelihoods. Hail cannons were first developed some hundred years ago and supposedly send shock waves into the clouds and break up whatever it is that creates hail. Some scientists scoff at the premise, but Georgian studies insist they are effective. I didn’t get a chance to get into the explanation, though. Looking up in the sky we saw a tornado emerge about a kilometer away. The sky was thick and ominous and heaven had created a perfect funnel from which a skinny but powerful whirlwind was spinning in one place like a Georgian dancer. This was no dust devil.
The telephones came out to record the anomaly. Tornadoes don’t happen in Georgia, at least not like this. One had been reported in Telavi in June 2007 and although it damaged a house, no one appears to remember it. There were a handful of Georgian visitors and a few Russian tourists around us. Kartlos, my partner on this trip, was on the phone resolving a business issue and the tornado fluctuated in size, but kept its position. I wondered whose vineyard was getting churned into shreds and considered a hiding place should it come in this direction. It wasn’t a monster midwestern twister that lifts homes off their foundations and sends them to Oz, yet it was clearly a powerful force of nature.
The Badagoni cafe ought to be alright, I thought. Then as if reading my mind, the tornado took a deep breath and made its move. A single bolt of lightning shot out of the top followed by a pissed off god ripping rumble of thunder. Hail the size of walnuts fell from the sky. Those rockets didn’t prevent a hail storm, they provoked a tempest. The cafe with its windows would not be a wise place to be.
The dozen spectators were all mesmerized by the approaching menace. The cloud above was beautiful, smooth, freakish, but the beast was growing and had its eyes on the cathedral, on us. Kartlos! I said, come on! There’s a tornado. Annoyed I had interrupted his call, he put up a finger. I pointed to the death wind ripping through the monastery’s vineyard to make my point. Tornado! I know what a tornado is, he snapped. But no one knew what a tornado was. People were smiling and pointing with their phone cameras at the beast. They reminded me of the people that flock to the beach when they hear of a tidal wave warning.
“Come on!” I ushered our two guests into Alaverdi’s entrance gate, two meter thick stone walls with a long history of repelling invaders. Others followed. A few went into the gift shop in front next to the road, which was all window. They were lucky. So was Kartlos.
We tried to run into the cathedral, obviously the safest place, but a monk whose task is to assure that every visitor adheres to the strict Georgian Christian Orthodox dress code of no shorts, no bare shoulders and every woman’s head covered, stopped us. Our guest was wearing shorts. But there is a tornado coming! I implored in a panicky Georgian-Russian. If they don’t have tornadoes in Georgia, do they have a word for them? A very big, strong wind is coming? I glanced around and saw no loaner coverings around. All I saw was death. Look, I shouted pointing at the most spectacular act of God either of us has ever seen and screamed, "tornado!"
He looked up and smiled like a village idiot welcoming the apocalypse and shouted no, you can’t go! I turned and had lost my guest’s husband. He was at the door, hypnotized. I brought her inside the U-shaped foyer, told her to wait in the corner and fetched the husband. Where’s Kartlos? Someone shut the main iron door. We huddled against the wall as the tornado hit the other side of it, flinging the iron door open and sending a young man in a red football shirt to the ground like a twig. Debris flew in from the open backside where the monk stood, blinded by grit as the tornado directly struck the cathedral 30 meters away and ripped the metal roof and cross off into oblivion. It hopped behind the church and as if satisfied with the statement it had made, began to dissolve.
In front of the gate, the sky was clearing and Kartlos was in his car, honking the horn. As we had entered the foyer he turned to see the twister coming towards his car so he ran back, jumped in and took off as it blasted through the cafe, flattened all the street signs and sent a car flipping across the street. Come on, let’s go! We took off across the valley towards Telavi, the sky now a summer hazy blue, our scalps and ears full of Kakhetian earth.
We pulled into the parking lot of Nikala, a hotel and restaurant on the bottom of the Gombori road. From its terrace the great Alazani Valley stretched below and in the distance stood the noble Alaverdi Cathedral. Only we knew its skullcap was gone. A table of men clinking water glasses filled to the brim with wine had no clue a horrifying storm had just ravaged the most sacred location in Kakheti and could have killed us.
Buzzing with adrenaline, we over-ordered, spurred on by our second whirlwind, a lively young waitress who insisted we try everything, especially the village chicken. We had already asked for khashlama, mtsvadi, kitri-pomidori and chikhirtma.
“And our trout, you have to try our trout.”
“No thank you, really.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, we are sure.”
“But you will love the chicken, trust me.”
"No, thank you."
"But really, you'll love it. If you don't, you can call me kalbatano (madam), otherwise, call me gogo (girl/miss).
Village chickens tend to be small and tasty and our guests had heard so much about bazhe sauce, what the hell. “Okay, okay, we’ll try the chicken. And chacha, please. We need chacha.”
At least I did. My epinephrine was late kicking in. But there was no chacha. A Kakhetian restaurant with no chacha is outlandish, as inconceivable as a tornado in the Alazani Valley
“Did you see the tornado?”
“No. I heard about it.”
“We were there. ”
I wanted recognition. I wanted her to know we were survivors, that we were special and deserved acknowledgement for that. But the way she said, "really" lacked the satisfying tone of astonishment. She might as well have grinned "that's nice."
“Water, lemonade?”
“We’ll have beer.”
Our nerves slowly waned as we waited for dinner and compared our footage, wrote friends and family, marveled at the view and processed our experience. Tornadoes weren't in your description, our guests said.
Nikola is not afraid to lay on old school portions. The salad and bread alone would have stuffed the four of us. The chikhirtma, in a rich stock, grandma style, is the perfect chicken soup for souls ravaged by a bout with alcohol or a tornado. The waitress, smiling, dropped the platter down with one hand, on it a bed of green leaf and a huge hen whacked into chunks, boiled, sprinkled with salt and chopped parsley with creamy bazhe on the side. It was tender enough and probably accounted for the layered beauty of the chikhirtma, but even with the bazhe, salt and herbs, it was still a boiled chicken. We called the waitress gogo.
Mtsvadi is to Kakheti what BBQ is to Texas. No one makes it poorly. Days of Tusheti lamb prompted us to go with veal, maintaining our halal weekend diet. These nuggets roasted over grape vine cuttings were unsurprisingly superb, but the real reason you go to Nikala is for the khashlama; Kartlos knows. Even when flavored just right, the boiled beef (or lamb) can be a jaw muscle workout, but these axe-whacked chunks deserve a Hollywood star. I was no longer hungry, yet I attacked them, slurping the juicy meat off the bones, heedless of my manners, licking my greasy fingers and doing the routine over again and again. But we were all lost in abandon, focused on the plates in front of us, hungry or not, while the sky above the Alazani Valley was cloudless and undisturbed.
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