ABSTRACT
Travellers to Soviet Georgia have often remarked on what seems to be an excessive generosity with which people there treat each other (Maclean 1980). It is regularly noted that Georgians spend considerable time and resources on organizing and consuming large feasts, and of how strangers are enthusiastically welcomed and incorporated into them.1 It is apparently quite common for diners in a restaurant to send over a couple of bottles of wine or a dish of meat to strangers at another table (quoted in Samshoblo 1981), and indeed one of us experienced such generosity at a picnic site outside Tblisi. When this happens the tables are likely to merge, addresses are exchanged and hopes expressed of continuing the relationships that the feast has established. Even before either of us made contact with Georgians, therefore, we were not surprised to hear that at Georgian feasts wine is expected to flow like water and that competitive drinking can reach levels that frequently startle outsiders.
