the not serious Aidan Raftery
Aidan Raftery hasn’t had formal training in winemaking but it seems wine has always featured somehow in some way in his life, a life that now happens to be making the stuff in a village somewhere in the Republic of Georgia.
Born in the UK, he arrived in Aotearoa with his family as a young chap. Serendipity would have it that the family home was perched just around the corner from some wine writer, Master of Wine guy called Bob Campbell.
With a curiosity of industrial proportions, Aidan took any opportunity to learn about wine from the neighbour, and his folks and to be honest, anyone who would engage in wine chats.
Fast forward a few years and a need to leave our small island in the pursuit of more adventure and we follow Aidan’s journey to Melbourne where he established one of the first natural wine bars in the city and began to get his hands truly dirty with grape stain. It was here he gave winemaking a crack and fell even further into his own personal very deep wine cave.
Aidan’s vim and vigour for learning, for making, for tasting and trying, for sharing and for caring about wine is bloody infectious. It’s also given him something of an enviable intrepid urge to follow his nose when it comes to wine adventures and nowhere says wine adventure more than Georgia, where the wine making history is deep, rich and UNESCO protected.
If you think amphora and clay eggs are a new thing, you’re about 6000 years out of touch. It’s in this unexpected but fascinating part of the world that Aidan has really put down his winemaking roots.
Chatting with this guy and drinking his wine is like being teleported to an utterly unknown terra firma. Grape varieties we’ve never heard of, inflictions on words that felt unfamiliar and hard to pronounce all wrapped up in cultural traditions from a whole other time. This is one special chat with one special chap.
So, put on your Chokha, put down your Panduri so you can pick up a glass and line up by the kvevris, this is the Not Serious Aidan Raftery chat.
NB: Aidan mentioned a travel booker in Wellington who takes curated tours to Georgia. You can find them at Eating Adventures and they have a few spots left for their September 24 trip and dates confirmed for 2025. Sounds like you might need to check that expiry date on the passport, people!
CHAT FACTS
-
Vintners & Vagabonds Katsia da Guneba 2020
antipodes still water
-
Look, this chat seriously took the cake with new terms. They were so unfamiliar, we’re still working through what those even were.
The wine that Aidan poured for us is not yet available in market. It’s not our usual style to promote something you can’t get your sticky mittens on but Aidan was in Aotearoa for a hot minute and we had a short window to tie him to a chair and get all this amazing storytelling squeezed out of him and onto a podcast recording. The image to the left is the bottle we slugged during the chats and Pete and John are talking to a pal in Australia who might have some of Aidan’s gear over there that they can share. Fingers crossed! We’ll keep you posted.
Find Aidan @vintnersandvagabonds
Recorded at By The Bottle. Edited by Benj Brooking at Popular. Thanks Benj! ♥️🍷
