On a Wednesday evening in October, a room at Hampton Station will fill with the smell of Georgian bread, the sound of a guitar or two, and the steady rhythm of a toastmaster working a crowd. The occasion is the Georgian October Wine Tasting at Keipi Restaurant, a two-hour taste-and-toast running from 6 to 8 p.m. on October 7, 2026. It is not a lecture, not a seated wine class, and not a ticketed concert. It is closer to a dinner party that happens to have a flight of wines in front of you and someone at the head of the table whose only job is to make sure the evening means something.
That someone is the tamada, the Georgian toastmaster. In the Republic of Georgia, the tamada is not an MC or a sommelier. He is the person who gives order to the feast, who decides when a glass is raised and what it is raised to, and who holds the attention of everyone at the table while it happens. Keipi's own description of the role is disarmingly plain: the tamada toasts "to all the things that make us human," and guests are invited, never forced, to toast as well. The October tasting follows that format with a curated flight of Georgian wines, light food pairings, and live music in the house.
To understand why a Georgian wine tasting exists at all in a converted cotton warehouse in Greenville, you have to go back to the 1990s, to a Peace Corps volunteer named John Heers, and to a country that had just come through a catastrophic civil war.
Heers had been trained to work on wells. His first posting, in Mali, taught him something else: the village that hosted him kept asking for a bridge he did not know how to build, and he learned to listen, find the right people, and serve a vision that already belonged to the village rather than one he had brought with him. In Georgia, in the Caucasus Mountains, he encountered a second lesson. Families with very little opened their tables anyway, poured wine, and made toasts that got to the heart of who he was. Hospitality there, as First Things Foundation puts it, was not decoration. It was a way of life.
Heers went on to found First Things Foundation, an organization that sends field workers to remote places for two-year stints, living as locals live and then giving momentum to the businesses and projects of the friends they make. The foundation's stated aim is to remind wealthy Westerners of what gives life meaning and to serve the poorest among them, and its method is deliberately unglamorous: arrive as a guest, learn the language and the food and the local order, listen long enough to be trusted, and only then serve work that begins there. It works through local "Impresarios," people with ideas and charisma who want to help their own communities.
Keipi Restaurant is what happened when that philosophy came home. Established in 2022 in Greenville, it is a nonprofit restaurant that serves as First Things Foundation's American headquarters and calls itself the Home of the American Supra. The word supra refers to the Georgian feast in its full formal expression; a keipi is the toasting dinner in its warmer, more everyday form. The restaurant's profits, after the bills and repairs and mistakes that come with running any kitchen, go back to the foundation to support its volunteers and local partners. Guests pay for meals and ticketed gatherings, and that is the whole business model.
The restaurant sits at 1320 Hampton Avenue Extension, in Hampton Station, a development carved out of a historic 1919 cotton warehouse in Greenville's Water Tower District. It is a few minutes from Main Street and directly on the newest spur of the Swamp Rabbit Trail, which means you can arrive by bike. The setting suits the food. Keipi serves khachapuri, the cheese bread that arrives at the table still bubbling, and khinkali, the pleated soup dumplings that require a small technique to eat without losing the broth. The wine list draws on a tradition that is, by any measure, the oldest in the world.
That is not a figure of speech. In 2017, archaeologists excavating a site called Gadachrili Gora in the South Caucasus uncovered ceramic shards coated with the chemical residue of fermented grapes dating to roughly 6,000 BC. The clay vessels at the site contained tartaric, malic, and citric acid, the unmistakable fingerprints of wine. Georgian winemaking is therefore at least 8,000 years old, two millennia older than the previously acknowledged wine production of the Near East and thousands of years older than the Greek and Roman traditions most Western drinkers think of as their heritage. Georgia has around 525 indigenous grape varieties. Two of the best known are rkatsiteli, a white grape that, when fermented on its skins, produces the amber-colored wine that has become a calling card of Georgian natural wine, and saperavi, a red grape with tinted flesh that yields wines of unusual depth.
The technique behind those wines is the qvevri, a large egg-shaped clay vessel sealed inside with beeswax and buried in the earth up to its neck. The surrounding soil holds a constant temperature of about 14 to 15 degrees Celsius year-round, which amounts to the world's first temperature-controlled cellar. White grapes go into the qvevri crushed, with skins, seeds, and stems together, and stay there for extended skin contact that can run six months or longer. The clay is slightly porous, allowing a slow micro-oxygenation without contributing any wood flavor, and the egg shape keeps the lees circulating naturally without pumping or stirring. After fermentation the lees settle to the point of the vessel and the wine clarifies on its own. In 2013, UNESCO added the Georgian qvevri winemaking tradition to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list.
All of which is the background to a fairly simple proposition: on October 7, you can sit down in Greenville and drink wine made by a method older than the pyramids, while a tamada asks the table to raise a glass to something that brings people together. The tasting is a drop-in restaurant event rather than a reserved-seat show, and as of this writing the restaurant's event page lists tickets as not yet on sale, with no admission price published. Keipi's larger ticketed gatherings, the full supra dinners, are capped at 25 seats and can be booked through the restaurant's website, but this October tasting is a different, lighter thing.
It is worth noting what Keipi asks of its guests on the nights when wine is poured freely. The restaurant's event page carries a note that it does not encourage people to drink, but that when they do, it works hard to be sure they get home safely, and it suggests arriving by ride-share. It is a small detail that says a lot about the institution: the table is the point, not the wine, and the host's responsibility does not end when the last toast is made.
The restaurant also runs a weekly community keipi on Fridays and hosts private ones any day of the week, for groups, businesses, weddings, conferences, birthdays, and, by its own cheerful accounting, even funerals. Its toastmasters travel. For events outside Greenville, they can be booked through a partner organization, the Supra Dinner Society, a 501(c)(3) founded by two of Heers's proteges with a mission to heal a divided American society starting at the table.
That phrase, starting at the table, is the through-line. First Things Foundation's own account of Keipi describes the restaurant as the place where the ideas behind the foundation met dinner service in Greenville, where guests had to be seated, served, fed, remembered, forgiven, and welcomed back. The American work, the foundation notes, begins from a different place than the work abroad. Abroad, a field worker steps into a life that already exists. At home, someone has to open the table first, and then let good work grow out of the shared life that forms around it.
On October 7, that table is open. There will be a flight of Georgian wine, small plates to go with it, a tamada to give the evening its shape, and live music in the house. The toasts, if the format holds, will be to things that bring us together, which is a modest enough ambition for a Wednesday and a rather old one for a restaurant in a cotton warehouse in South Carolina.