21 August, 2016 – Melbourne, Australia
For those loyal readers who avidly follow this Blog, or anyone else interested at all, you may recall that we did a tour of Georgia with Andrew Villone in 2015, see Posts below. Our main Host was John Wurdeman, American born Georgian and Owner of Pheasant Tears winery. Sadly, late last year the Sighnaghi house of Pheasant’s Tears’s founder, American artist John H Wurdeman, burned to the ground. No one was in the house so there were no injuries but all of their possessions, including heirlooms, were lost.
In Melboure, a fund raising event to help to enable John’s family house to be rebuilt was organised at the Arbory.
Fund Raising Event Notification
Julie and I decided to attend and it was a very good day, other than the weather, on Sunday, 21 August, 2016. It was held at the Arbory Restaurant which is on the Yarra River at the back and bottom of Flinders Street Railway station. I must admit that I did not know that the place existed.
Note the raincoat that Julie is wearing which represents two things:
(1) The weather was rainy off and on all day.
(2) The rain coat is the one that Julie bought in Georgia when we were on Andrew’s tour last year. A little worse for wear over time but definitely appropriate.
As indicated in the link above to the event, it was being co-hosted by Alice Zaslavsky, Georgian born now living in Melbourne. A very lively, outgoing young girl. See:
The following is the flyer for the event and the menu. Note the very large Kvevri used to make and mature much of the Georgian wine.
When we arrive, we discover that Julie is the first one on the attendees list. There are two areas and we select the one that has regular chairs, as opposed to stools. The Arbory is interesting because, at least where we were, it is totally outside without even a roof. However, there are a number of heaters, definitely needed, and there were large umbrellas to protect us, kind of, from the rain.
We are served our fist wine as the place starts to fill up. Our table had some nice people at it and the wine was good.
Our hosts appear and shout out greetings etc. There is no PA for them so shout is definitely the order of the day.
I do a bit of scouting around the restaurant to see what else is going on.
It suddenly started pouring rain. The umbrellas did a good job of keeping it off of us except for one place, that’s right my seat had a major stream on top of me. I moved to the side next to Julie to get a dry spot.
There was then an auction, the carte is in the back ground in the last photo. It was difficult with there being two sides of the restaurant, ours was spruiked by Alice, the other side by Raul. The other side won most of the lots but the bloke next to us did win one of them. All in all a very good day. We hope that lots of funds were raised, my analysis, probably hopelessly wrong, was there were around 100 participants there. Good onya Melbourne, you have done it again.