The cliff is red sandstone, cut by the river into the shape of a rooster's comb, and all along its foot are black holes: caves, big and small, which people dug out since before anyone counted. Brother Mattai, 71, leads me into the third one on the left, with a clay lamp that gives more smoke than light.
Inside it is cool and smells of earth and juniper. On the floor stand the jars, küp, buried to their necks, rows and rows of them, sealed with clay and ash. Each is a different age. Each has a number scratched in the clay in Syriac letters. He lays his palm on one. "This is the 2013. It is not ready. It is not sad about it."
The grapes are the dark, small maduk, dried on the vine until they are almost raisins, and the amber sary janyl. They are crushed by foot in the stone trough at the cave mouth, skins, stems, pips and all, then poured into a jar, the jar is closed and left. Four months, six. In the spring, at Easter, the jars are opened and the wine goes in clay-sealed bottles to every parish in Irad. The sweet, dark wine of the Eucharist.
"The Soviets pulled out half the vines. My grandfather buried the jars in the vineyard to hide them. When they came to dig them up again, nobody remembered which row. We found them by the smell."
He shows me a stack of jars with broken necks, the ones that did not survive winter. "They will go back into the earth. Sopol-Tepa will send us new ones." In the dark at the back of the cave, a young man in a dusty habit is scrubbing a jar with a bundle of juniper bark and lime, humming. He does not look up.
Outside, in the sun, Brother Mattai pours me a thimble of the 2009. It is so sweet that it hurts, and so dark that it looks like a coin. We drink in silence. After a while he says that tourists always ask what it tastes like, and he never knows how to answer, "because it tastes like waiting, and the word is not on the label."
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