Wine

I will let my sister, Laurel, explain why I am up at midnight on Sunday blogging when we turned in early.  J

This is the wine region Khaketi, and Georgians take their drinking very seriously.  The local grape is Saperavi, and the vines grow even grow in the city.  When we went for dinner with co-workers on Friday night, we saw where the grape vines made a canopy for the second floor porch.  And then on Saturday we saw where one foot square openings were made in the sidewalks on a busy main street, Chavchavadze Ave, and the vines were trained to climb the second floor balcony, where they screened the apartment and furnished grapes.

The grapes have been picked and wine been made, now is time to let it age.  On Saturday when we were shopping in the bazaar, one of the shop owners realized that we were Americans and shared some new wine from a jar.  He then gave us some olive to go with the wine, and a bottle of the local wine.   (He lost all of his profit plus on that sale.)  The bottle was in a fancy bottle, so latter we walked to Goodwill, a grocery store here, and bought three more fancy bottles of wine.  Got all four lined up now with the flowers in the kitchen.  I plan on drinking during vacation so I can take home the empty bottles.

On Sunday while walking on Chavchavadze Ave we passed the “Wine House”.  It was an outlet for the winery.  It had three big stainless steel tanks right there; one for white wine, one for sweet red, and one for dry red.  “Tasting” and “by the glass” did not translate.   You could bring in your own bottle to fill and buy by the liter, three gallon jug.  I will have to bring back a plastic bottle just to be able to buy good wine in bulk like that.  They had prior vintages bottled and for sale on the shelves.  There also was distilled liquor made from the seeds and skins of the grapes.  They take the leftovers from squeezing the primary wine fermentation, then grinding the seeds and further fermenting before distilling that mash just like making whiskey, just using grape seed instead of corn