Kachapuri and kebabs

So, I'm back from my travels. For a while, at least. Georgia was, er, interesting. Sometimes genuinely interesting, sometimes more in the nature of Chinese curse interesting.

We landed at Tbilisi airport at one in the morning and were whisked straight to the hotel, so I couldn't tell very much about where we were apart from the fact that everyone seemed to drive on whichever side of the road they felt like at any one time. The trip between airport and hotel seemed like a game of four-wheeled chicken.

After a few gentle hours of sight-seeing the next day, we were taken out for dinner to one of Tbilisi's best restaurants by the organisers of the wine competition I was there to judge. Dinner was delicious: lots of good, fresh, herby salads; a couple of kinds of cheeses – one similar to a slightly tough mozzarella, the other somewhat like feta; a dish of lamb stewed with herbs and sour plums and a minced lamb kebab enlivened with barberries and pomegranate seeds. Our host for the evening, a genial politician whose smile didn't quite reach his eyes, appointed himself tamada, or toastmaster, for the evening and raised his glass every eight minutes on average, with a new theme. We drank to Georgia, to women, to absent partners, to international co-operation, to marriage, to the success of the next few days' judging... to so many things, in fact, that I lost track of what I was toasting, despite the fact that I was only taking very small sips of the wine in my glass. Apparently we got off lightly: the true Georgian tradition is that you drain your glass at each toast.

After a press conference the next day (it would seem that a wine competition is big news in Georgia, meriting exposure in the national newspaper and the evening news on TV), we set off for Sighnagi, the village where the competition would actually be held. Sighnagi, it turns out, is a bit of Potemkin village, designed to attract tourist dollars to help shore up Georgia's rather feeble economy. The trouble with Sighnagi as a tourist destination (apart from the glossy Disneyland-esque quality of the village, which stands in complete contrast to the poverty of all the other villages I passed through) is that it only has one hotel and two restaurants.

The hotel was truly abysmal. I picked five dead flies off the synthetic carpet in my room (the very same carpet that sent out sparks of static electricity with every footfall) and flushed them down the loo. What I couldn't get rid of was the mouldy smell in my room – it was like sleeping in a corked bedroom. It was so bad that the only way I could fall asleep at night was by dousing myself in perfume to over-ride the damp aromas.

As for the restaurants, on the first night we visited Sighnagi's 'French' restaurant, where we were served by the place's one waitress, a bored teenager who was obviously pissed off that we (the only table of diners) had prevented her from bunking off early to hook up with her boyfriend. Her boyfriend may well have been the chef, whose sole function was to open cans and tip the contents onto a plate. Actually, I lie. He was also responsible for my 'pork chops with spinach', which turned out to be two meatless spare ribs doused in vinegar and a salt pan's worth of salt, accompanied by four burned balls of spinach that had been cooked hours earlier and left to go cold.

I have to admit to having had a bloody good cry that night after I got off the phone to Mark. So much for the glamour of my life as a wine writer...

Things got mildly better the next day. The competition helped to take my mind off my surroundings (we tasted 180 or so wines and 12 chachas – local grape brandy) and we discovered the town's other restaurant, which served authentic Georgian dishes. In practice, this meant a plate of herbs, spring onions and radishes, more of the salty, feta-like cheese, more kebabs and kachapuri, a kind of Georgian cheese pizza. While it wasn't haute cuisine, it was better than what was on offer at the French restaurant, so that's what we ate for lunch and dinner for the next three days.

I've never yearned for home more than I did last week. Mark, bless him, came to pick me up from the airport and proudly announced that he was cooking me dinner to welcome me home. He'd planned on making lamb burgers and salad, but I just couldn't face more minced lamb and salad. We went out for a Chinese meal instead.