The stone weighs forty pounds and has a chip on one corner where my grandmother dropped it on the kitchen floor in 1974. She was making sulguni, the way her mother taught her, the way her mother's mother taught her — heat the curds in salted whey, knead with both hands, and then press, with a stone, until the shape holds.
I have that stone now, in Dublin, Ohio. It sits on a shelf in our creamery between a digital pH meter and a stack of food-safety paperwork from the state of Ohio.
What we mean by 'two thousand years'
Cheese has been made in the Caucasus for as long as people have kept domesticated cows. The earliest archaeological evidence goes back to the late Bronze Age, somewhere around 1500 BCE.
What we owe to the village
When my parents left Tbilisi in 1991, they took two suitcases. One was full of clothes; the other had a wedge of sulguni wrapped in cheesecloth, a jar of pickled jonjoli, and the stone.
What 'fresh every day' actually means
Sulguni does not keep. The fresh kind is best within ten days. So we make it every morning. The milk arrives at six. The wheels go into brine at eleven. By five in the afternoon, the day's batch is in a cooler on its way to UPS.