gena » 26 фев 2009, 14:59
Pro armyan i vino-kon'yak v Teherane ya prochital zdes':
---------------------------
Finding wine for my wedding in Tehran
By Azadeh Moaveni Published: January 30, 2009
As a young Californian I always assumed I would be married at a winery or on an island, places where wedding planning does not involve separate reception halls for men and women and pre-emptive security against a morality-police raid. But I met my future husband while living in Iran. We spent one of our first dates combing the fruit bazaars of Tehran for wine grapes. We crushed them by hand in the gentle summer heat and spent solicitous afternoons over our single barrel as a pretext for further courtship.
All of this convinced me that the prohibition of alcohol in Iran, while inconvenient, was not altogether unromantic. Buying five cases of red wine at once is, however, virtually impossible, as I discovered before my Tehran wedding in 2005.
Most Iranians don't serve drinks at weddings: Official banquet halls have laws, extra bribery is required in case of a raid and there's a belief that guests tend to brawl at wet receptions (macho culture and liquor do not mix well). Yet I desperately wanted drinks at my reception, as did my fiancé, Arash. In fact, I wanted a proper bar, staffed by the city's best bartenders, two Afghan brothers from Herat who mixed a mean martini.
My Iranian future in-laws frowned on the idea, which actually mattered quite a lot, since in Iran it is customary for the groom's family to plan and pay for the wedding. Having recently suffered the acute boredom of two dry weddings, I was determined to make alcohol my battle. Most Iranian brides seek a major concession over an extravagant wedding dress or a set of jewelry, but I cut back on nearly everything else to help leverage a bar.
I won out in the end, but that turned out to be the easy part. The first dealer I called was an Armenian called Edo. The state permits Christians (less than 1 percent of the population) to make and consume alcohol, so bootleggers are usually Armenian Christians or Muslims using Armenian names. Edo was incredulous. "You want 60 bottles of wine? I'm sorry, but that sounds like a trap," he said, hanging up. I asked one of my cousins to introduce me to her bootlegger, Joseph. But we soon learned that he had been caught by the police with a trunkload of whiskey. (He resumed dealing after one of his clients, a well-placed judge, intervened.)
Growing desperate, I went to an Armenian friend. Her best connection was named Edgar, she told me. He'd printed glossy catalogs of his stock; like that of most dealers, it was smuggled across the Iraqi border from the Kurdish city Sulaimaniya. But Edgar was preparing to emigrate to Glendale, California. She suggested I try a family friend whose name even I had heard. Before 1979, this friend ran one of Tehran's leading hair salons, but after the revolution banned males from tending female hair, he was forced into private house calls. Soon he began supplying his clients with homemade vodka and wine as well as blowouts. When I tracked him down, he said that to supply what I needed he would have to go to untested vintners (housewives who fermented in their garages) and wouldn't be able to guarantee the quality.
In the end, I realized I had to delegate the task to my aunts, who after 30 years of Islamic prohibition had established their own trusted connections and means of giving a large party with drinks. On the day of our wedding, I was astonished by what they managed. At the conclusion of our ceremony, I thought I would not feel such joy for a long time to come - until someone handed me a glass of Champagne. Throughout the evening, guests mingled about the Persian gardens with their glasses glinting in the moonlight. Older women who rarely drank did that night, as word spread that the Afghan bartenders were serving anything you could want, from kir royales to pomegranate martinis.
I didn't think acquiring alcohol in Iran could get any harder, but when I returned from London to spend three weeks in Tehran this past month, I found my friends busy hoarding liquor. The government usually tightens its controls in advance of Ramadan and Muharram, but the mood last month was especially stern. State television showed cautionary footage of bootleggers being arrested, their sinful beverages emptied into the gutter. Watching the scenes, I couldn't help thinking of the night that my husband and I were married. Everyone was awash in shiny-eyed nostalgia, embraced by memories of life before the revolution, when drinking was legal and drinks imparted to such evenings a soft, apolitical glow.