Vintage; I’m not just talking about the clothes

So this past weekend was vintage in Tokhliauri. I went to visit with my host family from training on Friday night and prepared to take part in the harvesting of the grapes on Saturday. They had a thousand questions about my site and new village and family. They were so currious as to what I had been up to since I left them a little over a month ago.
I was also surprised to learn that the commercial harvest had happened two weeks ago and over 90% of the grapes had already been picked and sent to the factory for wine production. The only grapes that were left were for their home production which was fine with me since that meant that it would just be me and the family there picking grapes rather than an army of people combing the vineyard.


The vineyard itself is in a beautiful spot surrounded by mountains and the leaves were turning thanks to some cold weather last week. We only had to harvest from about 2 acres of the 10 acre vineyard which back during the communist period was one large 1000 acre vineyard. We got out there at about 11am and started picking. It was really warm which was a nice change from last week, but I quickly realized that you can work up a huge sweat bending, clipping and hauling buckets of grapes up and down rows to the large boxes they are transported in.

First you had to find the grapes that my host mother wanted to be picked for her own home wine production.

Then you had to clip them off the tangled vines and put them into buckets. We were picking both Cabernet and Chard grapes.

This is a picture of me in the process...

Then you had to haul these buckets down rows that were 200-300 yards long and put them into giant boxes that could hold 30-40 buckets worth of grapes.

Once the grapes made it into all the boxes, a tractor came and delivered them to our house back in Tokhliauri. We were done for the day however and had a huge lunch and some red wine to go with it. I was tired as I could be and after our lunch took a 2 hour nap. When I woke up the tractor had delivered the wine and I spent the evening relaxing and visiting with my host-fmaily. The next morning my host-sisters loaded buckets of grapes from the boxes and it was my job to haul them across the courtyard to this devise that was maned my my host-mom who was squashing them and letting them fall into the barrels for storage. She was also in charge of quality control sonce some of the grapes were only good for eating and she didnt want them falling into her wine. This caused more than a few visits to my host-sisters with instructions shouted out and my host-mom lending a hand in the bucket packing.

Overall it was a great weekend that was both fun and a lot of work. I was glad I had the chance to go and to see how this age old process is done. Georgia had some of the oldest grape vines in the world, so it was cool to be there in the middle of vineyards that have produced grpaes for thousands of years and will continue to do so for a long long time.