Nino Vepkhishvili has many professions, interests and even more hobbies. When we heard about her daily activities, we tried to understand how she manages all of it in 24 hours, but the fact is, she does. You will see for yourself when you get to know her.
We visited Nino in Tsinandali, at her home, in the afternoon. As soon as she met the Aprili Media group, she asked where should she begin from. We started from her childhood: we learned how her chemistry teacher pushed her towards this field, how much she loved mathematics, why she couldn’t study philosophy, how she survived the 90s, and how she finally found what she loved to do.
Now 62 years old and working several jobs, she told us how she tries to preserve the uniqueness of Georgian wines, where she sees the future of this field, and how much she loves her chickens and vegetable garden, where she finds spiritual peace.
Nino and her family live in a two-story stone house. They have a large yard. The space where we sat during the interview is in the shadow of the house. Nearby is a stone-paved water tap, shaded by the family’s grapevine.
And out back is a large garden where Nino grows vegetables, fruit trees, and takes care of chickens. It’s hard not to notice the one-story structure in the yard, which doesn’t look like a traditional village building. It’s not. Here, Nino has set up a laboratory, where she tests wine and helps her winemaker son.
“I graduated from Tsinandali School. At that time, my school principal was Mrs. Lamara Kalandadze, a chemist by profession. I was her favorite student, so to speak. I had many opportunities to go in different directions, I graduated from school with a medal and I really upset my parents when I did not go to medical school, but Lamara persuaded me: no, this one must become a chemist, it cannot be otherwise.
“I was also very good at journalism, I also wrote poems, but this woman made me give up everything. However, it turned out later that this profession was not alien and far from everything that I loved. Mathematics is my favorite subject. Despite the fact that I have different professions, mathematics is very close to me,” — this is how Nino began talking about her many-sided interests.
She entered Tbilisi State University, and was a scholarship holder. Her diploma states her profession as a chemist, chemistry teacher. Then she studied for a master’s degree, got married and had two children. She tells us that in the 90s, things were very difficult for her and she couldn’t find a job in her profession.
“In many cases, I didn’t want all of that, I didn’t want to be a chemist, for example. I wanted to do something that encompassed all subjects, I loved all subjects equally. For example, philosophy.”
If you mentioned philosophy and psychology in the 90s, you would have been perceived as abnormal, and I didn’t even say anything about it out of fear.”
“You probably remember the challenges — no electricity, coupons, poverty. I had an elderly father-in-law who was bedridden. A minibus ran to our house once an hour, and I asked them to deliver medicine from one minibus to the next so that I could earn enough in the meantime to pay for it.”
We were not ashamed to do anything, no one, neither me nor any other woman. We also worked on the land. We had peaches and strawberries, we grew that and sold them at the market. We had an occasion when I stood there with my son, Vano, and sold strawberries. It wasn’t shameful, it was a period when it was so difficult for people, how could anybody mention it, while children and the elderly were waiting for me at home.”
At the same time, she worked as a substitute teacher at school. When someone went on maternity leave and a place became available, they would call her. She says that she had knowledge and could not do anything with it, it was terrible. She went to the head of the Telavi education department and told him that she was willing to work as a teacher anywhere. They had a chemist’s position in the village of Tetritsklebi, 17 kilometers from her home.
“I told him I would go. I had my 2 small children, my mother-in-law and my father-in-law, and I had to get up at dawn to catch the only minibus that left at 8 am. I worked there as a chemistry teacher for 4 years. That was happiness.”
In the early 2000s, they invited her to work at a wine factory in Shumi. She says that when the director offered her a job as a chemist, she held back. At that time, private companies were new and she did not trust them. Despite her resistance, they got her to agree.
“When I started working with wine, I found a solution in my future. I had a family, my children were growing up, and I was missing my own growth, and I found something, and that was winemaking. I feel like a fish in water in this field.”
She was hired as a laboratory chemist. She said she had no experience working in a laboratory, but she was willing to undergo training, and so she did: “I mastered the little laboratory skills that winemaking requires.” But she didn’t stop there, she enrolled in an agricultural university and studied wine technology.
“All this happened at a time when I already had children. While my daughter was giving birth upstairs, I was writing my diploma downstairs. I was 39-40 years old when I became a grandmother.”
Nino became the head of the laboratory at the company. During this period, when she was satisfied with her work, she accidentally met her chemistry lecturer: “When he found out that I worked in a winery, he said, ‘No, you should have stayed in your field.’ He told me that I should enroll in a doctoral program in food technology with them and forced me to go there.”
“So, I was forced to become a chemist, then a wine technologist, and now I have a doctorate, and I defended my thesis in food technology, in the direction of wine. The topic itself, on which I defended it, was wine chemistry — it combined all my professions.”
First, she became an assistant professor at Telavi University, then an associate professor, and now a full professor. She lectures on chemistry and wine technology. We asked Nino to explain the difference between winemaking and wine technology.
“The technologist sets the technologies for how to make a particular style of wine, and the winemaker carries it out with an army, so to speak. The winemaker has a very heavy workload, has to aim it very precisely to ultimately get to what the technologist wrote. These are my functions.”
When she started working in the lab, there was only one woman. Her staff was all men. We asked her if she had encountered any stereotypes in the field that natural sciences and wine are men’s work. She said she had not, and she doesn’t think that’s the case.
“I don’t feel like this is a man’s profession. There are so many female winemakers these days. So this is not new for women. It’s even more enjoyable in the sense that sometimes women’s organoleptics, their perception of taste and aroma, are more refined than men’s, and it’s often the case that men taste the wine and let us have the final say. For me, this is not a man’s profession.”
Nino says that neither during her childhood nor after marriage, there were any restrictions or obstacles to her interests, and her husband supports her in every way. Accordingly, no one has ever told her that this field is not suitable for her. On the contrary:
“They said that since I was born and raised in Tsinandali, and Tsinandali is my cradle, right here, your brain, talent, and mind should be dedicated to wine.”
How would the conversation about wine have gone if we hadn’t talked about the Russian embargo and its effects? Nino told us that Russia thought the embargo would destroy us, but it made us better in every way.
“When my son, Vano, became a winemaker and went to Germany to study, it was a very difficult period for Georgian winemaking, due to the Russian embargo. At that time, you could say that Georgian winemakers crucified me, saying, ‘You see, what a mess we are in, and where did you send your son to study? Nothing will work out now.’ When Vano arrived, there was a rush from companies trying to take him. Everyone tried to have a qualified winemaker with them. You should choose and appreciate a profession when it is down — it will definitely rise and reach its peak. That’s what happened in the case of winemaking,” Nino explained.
After telling us how she got to all of her professions, we asked her to tell us when and how she manages to do everything. Her day starts at 8:00 AM. First, she does her housework and prepares for university.
“I start lectures at 10, finish somewhere around 2-3. Then I go down to Shumi and do my work, finish at 6. When I come from there, I run out of Shumi to somehow quickly get to the vegetable garden and my chickens. These are my remedies. The vegetable garden helped me in many ways, it got me out of my situation. In the full sense of the word, it was therapy for me and it still is today. I really can’t do without the vegetable garden.
“Look at this streetlamp, it’s lit at 8-9 o’clock, I used to work and still work by the light of this streetlamp. When I finish up in the garden on its light, then the cooking begins, the next day I prepare lectures or write some technology for Shumi, night work, which I didn’t finish before three o’clock.”
“You know how I deal with it? If I give up and stop, then I get really tired. But if I don’t, and I have a good stamina, I never get tired.”
When asked whether the work of women and men in the region differs, she answered with a laugh: “When I came home from work, I ran into the vegetable garden, I worked, I ran out of there and my husband came along, saying, ‘Ah, ah, how much I have worked.’ I didn’t say anything.”
What happens in the morning — I’m already humming with the chickens and he comes down and says: “Wow, it’s so hot now, I should go.” I tell him, “There is no time for that, I am already sweating”. But what are you going to do? That’s what marriage is all about, that we understand each other.”
There are times when there are so many things to do, including meetings, conferences, and writing articles. She says it’s difficult, but she’s happy.
“This is my weapon, my means of sustaining my soul. This profession is my weapon. Knowledge is my weapon.”
Nino has not thought about moving from Tsinandali to live anywhere else. She does not like city life and says that this region offers the most opportunities for developing her profession.
We also talked about how women are often deprived of the opportunity to realize themselves, get an education, and get a job. She says she has heard of such cases: “In my time, you didn’t even have the right to say what your career is. How could you say something about your career… You had to do whatever they told you to do, whether it was university, a job, or something else. I think that if a woman wants to, she will do anything. But in order to maintain the family, in many cases, she has to make this decision, asking her husband where to go, where to work.”
We clarified: What do you think, should she ask? She replied with a laugh: “Well, I don’t know, if you ask someone like my husband, I know he would agree.”
Before the interview ended, we satisfied both the reader’s and our own interest and asked Nino what her work with wine involved: producing rare and little-known varieties, forgotten and lost wines, and preserving the uniqueness of wines of local origin. She says she conducts many experiments:
“I have a laboratory at home, where I do Vano’s (son’s) samples at midnight. This is a domestic thing, it’s familiarity. What can I do, they want to get out of me as much as possible, if I can do something. I do it with pleasure. When you do it for your son, it’s completely different,” Nino told us, adding that as a technologist, she has also had successes — she patented 3 technologies when she blended new-style wines, European and Kakhetian.
She is currently working on a project at the university that involves developing its own yeast for all Saperavi wines of different origins. She explained to us in detail what this means: Until the 1990s, Georgian wine was made with wild yeast, which is difficult to ferment, often has uneven temperatures, and can cause disease. Then commercial, dry yeast was introduced from abroad, which has taken hold well because it is easy to store and use. She explains that all wines of different origins, such as Mukuzani and Kindzmarauli, were made with this one type of yeast imported from abroad.
“You know what we ended up with, right? These places of origin lost their individuality. They themselves dictated to us that we should give them back “theirs”. We cannot return what is ours any other way — we have to ferment them with wild yeast, or with a cultured yeast derived from the wild. That is exactly what I did in this project, they make cultured yeast and it is just as easy to store as one imported from abroad. What good does it do — it must return its individuality to these wines.”
She explains that the cultured yeast, originally produced from the wild, was bred with a team of scientists, and then sent to England for DNA analysis and validation.
“I did it on 10 microzones then. The yeast of all ten microzones is different from each other, even though all ten were bred from Saperavi. From local Saperavi, from Napareuli Saperavi, for example, the second one was from Mukuzani. 9 samples were from Kakheti, 1 was from Bolnisi. That’s how Saperavi showed us different things in all ten. We made it on this own yeast for the second year and now we are already researching the wines — what new things these wines acquired with their own cultural yeast.”
To explain the importance of this project more simply, she told us:
“It could be the best wine, really. Both foreigners and our people are both crazy over it, but it has no individuality. There are 3 of us women, but we all have our own individuality. If there are 3 varieties of Saperavi, all of them have individuality, that’s it.”
Nino also spoke to us about the importance of Western education. For example, she cited the EU-funded DuGEOR project at the university, which is an opportunity to implement dual education in the Georgian higher education system and means double education – in a factory and in a higher education institution. We asked what European knowledge and experience will give to Georgian wine. She emphasized that we could teach Europeans how to make wine there, but their scientific progress is also important to us.
“Germany, Austria, Serbia — in these countries we were participants in the DuGEOR and adopted the practice. If I told you that we should use the West in the development of Georgian wine, I would be lying. This is not my opinion, it is not close to me. Because Georgian wine has its own path. Georgian wine is more than 80,000 years old.
Georgian should develop in the Georgian path, but it is necessary to be involved in the scientific and technological development that foreign countries are involved in. If we fall behind in this, we will fall far behind. No matter what you say, that we have a traditional one, we should make it in a Kvevri… Yes, we should make it in a Kvevri, but we do not have clay analysis. Why did I mention that I sent samples to England and Belgium, why didn’t I do it in Georgia, did I just have extra money?! Because this kind of analysis is not done here. Things that will help in wine research should also come here and be implemented.”
She also shared several examples of how Georgian and European experiences are combined — a Portuguese port-style fortified wine with Georgian elements, made from Georgian varieties, and fermented in a Kvevri.
“There’s one more. It’s a sparkling wine, if we call it champagne, we can’t call it champagne. Just like we can’t call it port wine. We call fortified wine — port wine, we call sparkling wine — champagne.”
Champagne has a 400-year history, we have 80,000 years, and why should we borrow that, right?! But the Champagne line that exists was not with us. We liked it, it is good, and why should we reject it?! But here too, Georgian elements come. The first fermentation of wine, which we call cuvee, is fermented in a Kvevri. We make it from Chinese and Rkatsiteli. Chinese is the best for champagne. We make it in a Kvevri, because Kvevri was not known in Europe. What we add it for secondary fermentation, is alcohol made from the skins of these varieties. Such a tandem is created between Georgian and European wines. We also gain knowledge from them, and they do the same, we have a barter exchange, — Nino told us.
She also added that the innovations and knowledge that come from the West are very important: “I can’t do without looking for innovations. When I go to a lecture, I can’t just talk about the traditional. Of course, it’s very good when this opportunity arises.
“When I was studying, I used to go to Moscow to work in the library, I would go there for months. What I do now in seconds on this box [on the computer], I had to do there for years. This helps us a lot.”
At the end of the interview, she told us that our focus and direction is towards Europe, so it would be bad to deviate from this path.
“There should be an exchange of interests, knowledge, experience, everything. We are one house, I think, all of Europe and the whole world. Why should we fight, why shouldn’t we get along with each other?”