Oda Wine Backyard: Historical-World Wine and Balkan Small Plates in Margaretville

I bear in mind the primary time I realized about amber wines from the nation of Georgia. Whereas most generally accessible “orange” wines I had encountered felt a bit just like the producers have been simply hopping on the bandwagon of the buzzy popularity of skin-contact pure wines, studying about how the small family-owned vineyards in Georgia fermented their amber wines in large clay amphoras known as qvevri then buried them below the earth felt positively historic, in the perfect form of method.

click on to enlarge

Courtesy Oda Wine Backyard

Oda Wine Backyard opened on Foremost Road in Margaretville in July

That’s largely as a result of the artwork of constructing conventional Georgian amber wines goes again over 5,000 years, with archaeological proof that factors to the nation as one of many oldest (if not the oldest) winemaking areas on this planet.

For a lot of the twentieth century, Soviet-era insurance policies compelled Georgia’s vineyards away from indigenous grape varieties in the direction of blight-resilient cultivars match for mass-scale manufacturing and export. However now, after three many years spent catching as much as the remainder of the trade, Georgia’s wines have lastly reemerged because the epitome of historic winemaking in modern type.

click on to enlarge

Photograph by Ashleigh Lovelace

“Georgia is a really resilient tradition. It has been dominated by many others all through historical past, they usually’ve been in a position to preserve their language, their delicacies, and their winemaking by way of all of it,” says Anastassia Tsivy, who opened the wine bar Oda Wine Backyard within the Catskill Mountain city of Margaretville along with her husband Noli Alaj this July. “The historical past of Georgian winemaking is what made us wish to concentrate on ancient-world areas like Croatia, Greece, and Georgia, as a result of they don’t seem to be very well-known, however the wines are very top quality. We wished to share the wines from our areas and assist individuals uncover them.”

Tsivy and Alaj, who’re each first-generation immigrants from Georgia and Albania, respectively, started dreaming of opening Oda after journeys again dwelling to each nations earlier than Covid. “It made us recognize our personal tradition,” says Tsivy. “It is extremely completely different the best way that we eat and drink collectively, and what these issues imply to us.”

click on to enlarge

Photograph by Ashleigh Lovelace

The Balkan Platter has a bit one thing from nearly every little thing on the menu at Oda Wine Bar

Although they’ve each been working within the company world for the previous 10 years, the 2 known as on their mixed 20 years of working within the New York Metropolis hospitality trade in opening Oda. Tsivy honed her wine information working at a number of wine bars, together with the beloved Spanish tapas spot Ñ in Soho, whereas Alaj labored each front- and back-of-the-house positions within the critically acclaimed eating places of fellow Albanian immigrant and early farm-to-table champion, chef Zod Arifa.

After many weekend journeys as much as the Catskills, they purchased a house in Andes about six years in the past, and when the chance arose earlier this 12 months to open a bit spot of their very own on Foremost Road in Margaretville, they jumped. “We appeared on the house and the patio, and we thought possibly we may do one thing right here,” says Tsivy. “It was fairly spontaneous.”

They accomplished a lot of the renovations for the house themselves, remodeling the tiny inside of the previous barbershop into an intimate 18-seat eating room with crisp white partitions, birch-hued wooden chairs and barstools, and a thick wooden slab bar. Soviet-era posters and ads for Georgia adorn one wall. Out entrance, the pea gravel patio seats 20 or extra in good climate, a perk my celebration and I loved on our go to.

A Palate-Increasing Menu

click on to enlarge

The menu at Oda focuses on the wealthy culinary and winemaking heritage of nations within the Balkans and Caucasus areas. The 14 wines provided by the glass and carafe throughout our go to ranged from stony whites from Spain and Greece to a peppy rosé from Catalonia, a tannic, bone-dry Georgian amber, and sophisticated, lesser-known reds from Croatia, Slovenia, and Georgia, with just a few extra acquainted French choices thrown in for good measure.

The pricing on the orange wine part alone is a microcosm of Oda’s strategy: with three choices at $11 to $17 a glass, there are blessedly reasonably priced choices alongside splurge costs for adventurous wine lovers out for an exploratory sipping sesh. The bottle listing of near 100 wines is the place Tsivy will get to play with sourcing extra obscure varieties like Greece’s beloved Retsina, a wine fermented with the resin or branches from the Aleppo pine tree that the nation’s producers are bringing again from a harsh fringe of unpalatability.

click on to enlarge

Courtesy Oda Wine Backyard

Complete-roasted eggplant with whipped ricotta-mascarpone cream and inexperienced olive relish

On the meals aspect of the menu, Alaj is popping out a decent listing of well-composed small plates largely impressed by Balkan cuisines. Individually, most dishes pair effectively with a glass of wine as a pre-dinner aperitivo or—like we did, they are often mixed into a fairly substantial meal.

For anybody intimidated by unfamiliar flavors or substances, there are a number of plates that pull from well-known European traditions to fall again on, together with a hen liver or mushroom paté ($7), a burrata salad with heirloom tomatoes ($13), and the impressive-looking whole-roasted eggplant with whipped ricotta-mascarpone cream and inexperienced olive relish ($13).

click on to enlarge

Courtesy Oda Wine Backyard

The barrel-aged feta is served with Georgian preserved walnuts, that are unripe walnuts poached in syrup till their shells are softened and made edible.

The Balkan platter ($40) is the standout dish on the menu. It leans closely into the daring, vibrant flavors of Albanian and Georgian cuisines, and combines lots of the menu’s different small plates into one.

Alaj rotates its elements usually, however on the night we visited, it featured sujuk, an Albanian fermented spicy beef sausage; smoked beef prosciutto; a creamy Albanian pink pepper sauce known as ajavar; a number of varieties of cheeses, together with a barrel-aged feta served with Georgian preserved walnuts (unripe walnuts poached in syrup till their shells are softened and made deliciously edible); smoked beets with mascarpone, a hefty wedge of flaky spinach burek; pide bread; and an array of house-fermented greens, providing a bracing chew to chop by way of all that richness.

Oda Wine Bar is open Friday 5 to 10:30pm, Saturday 12pm to 10:30pm, and Sunday 12 to 8pm.