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Georgian wine Sunday


October 4 is Georgian Wine Day. The whole country – the birthpace of wine – celebrated the day with events in the capital, Tbilisi, and major regional cities: Telavi, Batumi, Kutaisi, Zugdidi, Ambrolauri, Ozurgeti, and Gori. Grape growers, wine makers, wine cellars and sellers, restaurants, cafes, organizations, and companies took part in the festival, a celebration of the recent harvest season.

The blog, vinepair.com, says there are 600-800 individual grapes in every single bottle of wine. That’s about 10 clusters of grapes per bottle. Farmers can produce between 2 tons of grapes per acre (during dry farming, organic farming, or biodynamic farming) to 10 tons of grapes per acre (quantity-yield farming). Each ton of grapes results in about 720 bottles (that’s 7,200 grape clusters or 432,000-576,000 individual grapes). So a farmer can produce anywhere between 720 to 8,000 bottles for every acre of land, depending on whether the techniques favour quantity or quality. So drink to celebrate all whom turn grape into wine, from grape to the harvest to the bottle.

While toasting to good wine, also toast to good wine quotes, of which there are as many as grapes in each bottle. For example, Paulo Coelho wrote in Brida, ‘All wines should be tasted; some should only be sipped, but with others, drink the whole bottle.’ The poet Rumi said ‘Either give me more wine or leave me alone.’ British politician Winston Churchill said ‘In success you deserve it and in defeat you need it.’ And lastly, Charles Baudelaire said ‘One should always be drunk … with wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose.’






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