At the height of Russia’s invasion of Georgia, I tried to decipher what the very active Russian blogosphere was saying. I took a gander at the blogs (mostly Live Journal) carried on Yandex. I do read and speak a bit of Russian, but I find Russian bloggers incredibly hard to understand. They express themselves in a round-about way laced in irony, and often with obscure and obscene slang. It’s not easy for a non-native speaker to follow, but a typical remark was that “The Western Mass Media” (understood as a single, unified voice) might say that this was violation of Georgian territory, but who in their right minds believes that Georgia’s borders mean anything?” Another line was that Georgia was simply mad to take on the might of the Russian army and was getting the beating it deserved.

Well I’m biased. I love Georgia. In fact, I challenge anyone to visit that wonderful country in more happy times and not love it. I was delighted recently when the two men fitting our granite kitchen counter (product of Estonia) turned out to be Georgian. They chatted happily with my Russian wife in Russian. Even our Polish builder speaks Russian. Our Ukrainian cleaner chipped into the chatter. In fact, sometimes our house sounds like a sort of East European enclave.

I think it’s pretty hard to visit Georgia without sampling its wonderful wine. In fact, it’s pretty hard to visit Georgia without drinking rather a lot of it. Last time I was there, a few years ago, at the end of a very long night’s drinking, and at the dawn of quite a boozy breakfast, I was invited to toast Joseph Stalin. Somehow I managed to avoid offense by changing the toast to “great leaders”.

I read that one of the things invading Russian and Ossetian troops were doing was to break into the wine cellars of the villages, drink what they wanted, and destroy the rest.

I was more pleased to read the Russian speaking Condoleezza Rice and her Polish counterpart, Radoslaw Sikorski, toasted their controversial missile treaty with Georgian wine. And then I was even more pleased to discover an English language blog dedicated to the worthy subject of Georgian wine, with a bit of history and culture too. There’s a blog about everything.