In Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhazia, there is an old pier with a sorrowful rusting shell of a café poking out over the Black Sea. What had been a dining room is a vacant space that mostly seems to serve as a public urinal, while upstairs a kiosk-sized café serves Turkish-style coffee, beer and snacks with plastic tables and chairs for locals who bitterly recall when the café was one of the most happening spots in Sukhumi. Georgians and Abkhaz dined, drank and danced together at the café, called Amra, until war erupted in 1992, and these friends and neighbors began killing each other. Within a year, much of what had been the capital of the Soviet Union’s “Red Riviera” was destroyed and as the Abkhaz advanced, some 250,000 Georgians were forced to flee their homes, not realizing they would never be able to return.

Renowned orange wine expert and award winning writer Simon J. Woolf tells the full history of this ancient wine and its modern struggle to gain acceptance in Amber Revolution: How the World Learned to Love Orange Wine (Interlink Books; Fall 2018). While the focus is mainly on orange wine history and culture in Slovenia, Italy and Georgia, the book also includes profiles of 180 of the best producers from 20 countries worldwide and is crammed full of all the information you need to find the best orange wines worldwide. We spoke to Woolf about the relationship between natural and orange wine, how Georgia fits into this story, the future of orange wine and much more.

In the latest installment in our Book Club series, we spoke to Alice Feiring about her new book, Natural Wine for the People (Ten Speed Press, 2019), a compact illustrated guide to natural wine. While this category is becoming enormously popular, especially in the U.S., there is still a lot of confusion about what exactly natural wine is, where to find it and how to enjoy it. This easy-to-understand primer sets the record straight. Feiring is the author of four other books, including For the Love of Wine: My Odyssey through the World’s Most Ancient Wine Culture, which was the subject of a previous CB Book Club Q&A. A prominent figure in the natural wine movement, she also publishes the natural wine newsletter The Feiring Line.