The New York Times
January 25, 2009 Sunday
Late Edition – Final

Wine-Order Bride

By AZADEH MOAVENI.

Azadeh Moaveni is the author of ”Lipstick Jihad.” Her new memoir,
”Honeymoon in Tehran,” will be published next month.

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, especially when family honor is on
display). Yet I desperately wanted drinks at my reception, as did my
fiance, Arash, though to a less-strenuous degree. 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 (one featuring the exertions of a stand-up
comic), 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
Joseph’s mobile phone seemed permanently off, and we soon learned that
he had been caught by the police with a trunkload of whiskey. (He
eventually resumed dealing after one of his clients, a well-placed
judge, intervened.)

Growing desperate, I went to an Armenian girlfriend. 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 winding
down his business and preparing to emigrate to Glendale, Calif. 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, rose-strewn pathways and pool with their glasses happily
glinting in the moonlight. Older women and elderly relatives who
rarely drank did that night, as word spread that the Afghan bartenders
were serving anything you could want, from kir royales to Negronis to
my own special request, 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 and roughed up, 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.