National Geographic: “Out of Eden Walk - Ghost of the Vine”

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Geographic fellow Paul Salopek offers another article about Georgia within his Out of Eden Walk series, now focusing on the country’s ancient wine-making traditions and its origins.

"One day, I visit the remains of a 2,200-year-old Roman town in central Georgia: Dzalisa. The beautiful mosaic floors of a palace are holed, bizarrely pocked, by clay cavities large enough to hold a man. They are kvevri. Medieval Georgians used the archaeological ruins to brew wine. South of Tbilisi, on a rocky mesa above a deep river gorge, lies the oldest hominid find outside Africa: a 1.8-million-year-old repository of hyena dens that contain the skulls of Homo erectus. In the ninth or tenth centuries, workers dug a gigantic kvevri into the site, destroying priceless pre-human bones. Georgia’s past is punctured by wine. It marinates in tannins.”

Salopek has already published other articles about Georgia, as he is making an unexpected stop in Georgia, while retracing on foot the global migration of our ancestors in a 21,000-mile, seven-year odyssey that begins in Ethiopia and ends in Tierra del Fuego.

After being denied a visa to walk through Iran, Salopek’s plans changed and instead he is spending several weeks and possibly months in Georgia waiting out summer and escaping the torturous heat of his next destination – Turkmenistan.

Read the full article here: www.nationalgeographic.com