The stairs down are narrow, stone worn smooth by other people's hands. It gets cooler with each step. By the time I reach the bottom, Tbilisi feels far away, even though it is right above me, still going about its evening.
The qvevri sit buried in the floor, necks poking up like something half remembered. The man running the place doesn't explain much. He doesn't need to. He pulls the wine straight from the clay, pours it without ceremony, and it comes out amber, cloudy, smelling faintly of hay and something fermented and honest. I taste tannin first, then earth, then a kind of quiet.
There is bread on the board, torn not cut, and a walnut paste the color of wet sand. I eat with my hands. Somewhere behind me a conversation happens in Georgian, low and unhurried, the kind of talk that doesn't need me to understand it to feel warm.
My camera sits on the table, untouched for a while. Some light isn't worth chasing, it just wants to be sat in. The cellar hums with something older than wine, older than me. I think about how far underground I am, how far from anywhere I usually am, and how neither distance bothers me tonight.
This is the kind of evening that doesn't photograph well and doesn't need to. Still, I lift the camera once, just once, before the light goes fully dim. Some things you keep for yourself first.
