Pheasant's Tears Saperavi 2019 - Georgian

 We tried a bottle of this wine the other day with food: beef steak. This Georgian wine well made from grapes indigenous to the Kakheti region. The grapes are well suited to the soil and climate. The wines are fermented in amphorae which are buried into the ground and lined with beeswax. The wine is produced by a superb wine maker, and you can tell that the traditional methods of production come through into the wine. The wine has a taste and character of its own. It is of full body and is concentrated and complex and has a deep fruity flavour. The wine remains on the palate for a long time. It is a wine for drinking with food and it should be savoured and not sloshed back.

We drank our wine too young it will improve in the bottle for ten years. We will search out this wine and buy some bottles for further keeping.

Georgia was probably the region of the world where wine was first produced in Neolithic times more than 8,000 years ago. Wine production in this area is fully entwined in the culture of Georgia. There are not many wine production areas which ferment the wine in amphorae. 

At around £20 a bottle it is not cheap, but it is worth searching out. It's a delight. 

https://www.vinvm.co.uk/pheasants-tears-saperavi-2019

Dry January 2022

Once again my wife and I did not participate in dry January 2022. Why is that? We do not drink so much that we feel the need to cut down on on drinking. We do not like being manipulated by health authorities or anyone else for that matter.

During January we had a period of 6 days when we did not drink., and that is because the thought did not cross our minds to open a bottle. This is a way life for us; we don't feel obliged to drink or not to drink.

Last Sunday, we had 7 people for dinner and drank two bottles of Champagne, a bottle of Prosecco, two bottles of red and a quarter bottle of sweet white wine. That meant that on average we each drank about 3/4 of a bottle of wine. This is more than the health recommendations. The next day we did not have a hangover and we didn't feel any sense of guilt. We didn't feel the need to go on the wagon for the rest of the month. Our drinking habits mean that over the course of the month we don't drink too much.

Without being sanctimonious or finger pointing, my opinion is that if you drink so much that you feel the need not to drink for the month of January then you might be better off not drinking at all. Lots of people indulge in dry January because of peer pressure or blandishments from the health authorities and they are not problem drinkers. There is, however, a substantial number of people who cannot control their drinking, if you are one of then the best advice is to quit altogether, as you can still enjoy your life by just drinking water, tea or coffee - this is what we did on our 6 day abstinence.