A toast to the Georgian harvest

Hannah celebrates her colourful experience of picking grapes in Georgia

I’d like to propose a toast to the Georgian grape harvest.

To Georgia's ancient ladies and their pirate knives and three-legged stools, their hair in scarves to deflect the burrs I still find in my socks.

To a total lack of mechanisation, organisation and weather stations; and to zero early starts.

To Ramaz’s family and his wild vines small and gnarly in all their hundred — he thinks — years; the yeast-footed and furious, wildly drunk bees; leftover lobio lunches and salty cheese.

To the village of Dimi, Imereti, and to Didimi; to his inky grapes Dzelshavi. To his seventy-plus years, potato-nose, wines and tiny turbaned wife.

To all Georgian wives.

To the Georgian make-do mentality and their boundless practicality about things like weighing grapes on bathroom scales.

To the land: in October still green and bountiful. The sun-tipped always present mountains pink and blue, (already) white-capped and gold and very beautiful.

To the blunt secateurs and broken black crates and thick plastic bags s…