Q: Wine has great symbolic meaning in many cultures and is present in many religions. Even Islam, which forbids it in this life, promises wine – literally rivers of it – as a reward in the afterlife. Just as ayahuasca in indigenous cultures of the Amazon, wine has long been used in various rituals elsewhere to evoke mystical experiences. One notable example is the Bacchanalia, a festival dedicated to Bacchus, the ancient Roman god of fertility, dating back to the third century B.C. There, wine served as a conduit for spiritual transcendence, enabling participants – through frenzied dancing, singing, and revelry under its spell – to access a realm beyond their normal perception and establish a connection with the divine. Given its 8,000-year history of winemaking, cultural ties to ancient Greco-Roman civilization, and the near sacral status of wine in Georgian culture today, has it ever played a similar role in local religious tradition, as a gateway to the supernatural realm?..

Q: Despite its prehistoric origins, the coverage of Georgian wine culture in the global media, including even the most erudite and elaborate reviews, often presents it as a rather recent, largely exotic, almost odd phenomenon. How do you explain that?

GM: This peculiar state of affairs is not so much due to Georgian wine culture per se, but to a host of factors that are largely external to it – a combination of geographic, political, demographic, economic, religious, technological and commercial circumstances of our wine culture...

Q: Alice Feiring has written a book about her travels in Georgia. It reads like a love letter to the Georgian people and their tradition of winemaking. Among other things, she points to the struggle of Georgian wine culture to stay true to its heritage. In other words, this culture is not wrapped up in itself, locked into its formulas, liquids and ceremonies. It also has a political dimension...

GM: That's true. This culture transcends its self-referential and hedonistic parameters, important as they are. It also encapsulates ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, psychology, spirituality, community, and many other dimensions of being...

Q: You remarked that your initial experience in the field was both challenging and exciting. The exciting part aside for now, what was your greatest challenge in that phase?

GM: As Lisa Granik mentioned in her intro above, there were no winemakers in our family. I and Zurab, we were pioneers in this field. To complicate our story, this field was the graveyard of the wine industry in the early 1990s, when the Soviet system collapsed, with its "falling tide running all boats aground"...

Q: You said that tomorrow is already upon you. In what sense?

GM: The future has stepped in a year ago, when we started thinking of a major paradigm shift in our business. It spells the structural development of our base and certain finetuning in the spectrum of our products, involving among other things the angle from which our new wines will be introduced. By thinking I do not mean idle musings, but a number of practical steps already taken in this direction...