Chaduna

Café and wine bar, tastings by David Dukashvili

On Galaktion Tabidze Street, not far from Freedom Square, David Dukashvili keeps a small café and wine bar called Chaduna. Wine here is not so much drunk as understood.

At a tasting Duka sets five glasses in front of the guest. Among them are qvevri and amber wines. The talk starts with the wine and quickly goes deeper: into eight thousand years of Georgian winemaking, into how a qvevri is built, into the different wine regions, and into why one and the same wine can feel different depending on how you come to it. Duka explains where to look, what to smell, what to search for in the taste. At some point it becomes clear that the tasting is not there to decide whether you liked the wine, but to teach you to hear it.

The list holds more than sixty wines. The food is cooked with love.

Once a month Chaduna changes its usual rhythm and becomes the place for Winyl Sessions. Duka plays records from his own collection: rare pressings, forgotten recordings, albums that for some reason you want to hear whole. Music here does not fill the pauses between conversations. It is the other way round: the conversations grow around the music.

Between records Duka tells how an album was made, who made it, what went on in the studio and why one recording sounds nothing like another. Behind those stories lie years of work in the music industry and, it seems, far more time spent among records.

The wine is chosen to go with the music. At one table you find people who know these recordings by heart and people hearing the performer for the first time. That is the point of the evening: not background, but attention. To the music, to the wine, to the person across the table.