Retirement blog about Georgian wine

I’ve had a mixed reaction from my readers to the issue of idleness in retirement with or without the devil’s contribution. On one hand, there was, don’t worry about it, it’s fine. On the other, idleness is indeed something to be banished from the retired person’s lexicon. Not sure whether he meant the word or the inactivity itself. I suspect idleness, aka chosen inactivity or relaxation, take your moral pick, divides opinion in we retired people.

Whether it does or not, it won’t seem to go away as an underpinning ‘value’ in my retirement life. Take last Thursday (as it will be when this blog is posted), once again I sat on the sofa twiddling with my phone. No Amazon book order this time, but something equally as ‘dangerous’.

I don’t know how I got to this site (actually I do, I googled it). Probably the imminent arrival of one of (the last actually) my four books ordered from Amazon – the one on Georgian wine. This set me off on one of my retirement reminisces, hence the category of this blog. Whether reminiscing counts as worse than idleness, I’m not entirely sure.

This reminiscing business, that may or may not be worse than actual idleness, leads to some slightly weird views of the past. Call it nostalgia. On this day that nostalgia took the form of a fondness for Georgian wine. It all began while we were working for UNICEF in Tbilisi, capital of Georgia, in case you didn’t know. While we were there we had the opportunity to drink a few bottles of Georgian wine. How this happened is a bit of a story.

It went something like this. About 2 or3 years before I retired I was seconded to work for UNICEF, the charity off-shoot from the UN, related to working with children. We’d worked in Turkey and had more or less been asked to leave. Accused of being arrogant, so I was told. Moi, surely not. They wanted at that time to join the European Union (how ironic is that now?) and a condition of their joining was to improve the quality of their schools.

That led to us, as insufferable foreigners, telling them how to run their schools. In the end even the prospect of membership of the EU was not enough to put up with us (and our arrogance). We left Turkey and I never got to Istanbul, the city I wanted to see. We worked in Ankara as the country’s capital, home of government etc. which wasn’t so exciting but interesting nevertheless. Anyway we were asked to leave. So goodbye Turkey.

Hello Georgia. Our team moved on to Tbilisi, (with the promise of work in the ‘Stans’ to follow as UNICEF people referred to that set of countries in their own right after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, I think)). Quite exciting, and a definite antidote to any boredom / complacency I might have been feeling in my working life in the UK. Yes, even then I was a restless soul.

All was going well, then after our second visit, the bloody Russians invaded (or reclaimed, take your pick) two of the Northern most parts of the country. In the way of things, in that part of the world, the reaction was unusual, or so I thought. The part of the population that saw themselves as Georgian moved out and, those that identified themselves as Russian, stayed. Those that moved out were ‘re-housed’ in Tbilisi. I say ‘rehoused’ but actually it should have been re-schooled because they were re-located into the schools, the very schools we had been working in with our anti-violence programme.

Result, end of programme and goodbye Georgia. This was particularly galling as we had been promised that, on our next visit, we would be taken to the wine-making areas (near what was now Russian territory) to visit some of their vineyards.

I’m getting ahead of myself. While in Tbilisi we had been taken to a couple of excellent restaurants. I still have somewhere a video clip taken on my phone of some Georgian singing. Very moving. Even more moving was their wine. I had no idea, at that time, that Georgia made wine. Now I know that it is regarded as the ‘cradle of wine’, wine having been made there for 8,000 years. So they reckon. The prospect of a tour of these vineyards was exciting to say the least. Didn’t happen.

But, and here’s the thing, after all these years my fondness for Georgian wine lives on – I think. And that’s the only explanation I can give for why I bought the book above and then, with my idle hands, bought a case of Georgian wine. Which has just, as I write this, arrived at our front door.

As all this nostalgia was building to a head in my idle brain, I started to ponder how we might make a return visit to Tbilisi and show Mrs Summerhouse the places I had enjoyed on my working trips. Maybe even make that trip to those vineyards I had been so cruelly robbed of by those dratted Russians. Aided and abetted by my new book, I started to plan. Until I read in last weekends’ papers about the violence happening in Tbilisi on account of some anti-government protest. So scrub that then.

I’ve started to read the book but what I haven’t done, at the time of writing, is sample the wine. Apart from the two bottles I brought back in my suitcase and the one we drank in the Moscow restaurant*, see below, I haven’t drunk any Georgian wine since. Is there a danger I shall be disappointed? As we all know, nostalgia isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Before this blog is published I shall be sure and try a couple of bottles and let you know**. It would be nice to write something positive, because Georgian wine producers are very keen to promote their wine abroad (and reduce their dependence on exports to Russia, their main customer still, but fickle, so the book says). Anyway that will do for this retirement blog. There’s a moral to this blog, it may be about not allowing yourself to spend £200+ on a case of Georgian wine without any tasting, or it’s that idleness thing in retirement – again.

*As an amusant side story, in 2012, a couple of years after the aborted Georgian trip, we made a visit to Moscow. This would be a year before we retired. In an attempt to revisit my fondness for Georgian wine, we searched out a Georgian restaurant. Perhaps it was surprising that such a place existed at all because relationships between Georgia and Russia were far from convivial and getting worse. Anyway we found such a restaurant, sat down, ordered our food. When we asked for a bottle of Georgian wine, there was an awkward silence and some mumbled conversation in a foreign language. Eventually they brought us the bottle, wrapped in a canvas bag, and told us not to remove it. This on account of it would upset the Russians. Not had that happen before or since.

**Tried one it was every bit as good as I remembered it.