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TEBI podcast 44: Lisa Granik MW on wine, travel, law and becoming a world expert in your second career
465 Plays1 year ago
In the fourth of a series of 12 TEBI episodes looking at meaning and money during later careers or second lives, Jonathan Hollow interviews Master of Wine Lisa Granik about her remarkable second life as a world expert on the wines of Georgia, the country in the Caucasus.
She reflects on transitioning from law to becoming a wine academic - thanks to her unique skills and background. She shares insights about Georgian wine culture, its historical significance, and economic impact. Lisa addresses challenges she has faced as a woman in the wine industry, and reflects on the changing roles of women in wine. The conversation delves into her deep connections with Georgia and her book "The Wines of Georgia”, which explores the culture, history, terroirs, and personalities of Georgian winemaking.
And she describes how she has found her way from one stage to another in her life - sometimes taking a sharp turn, sometimes gradually.
This podcast series has been developed with financial planning firm Mulberry Bow. Based in London, they offer a highly personalised service to around 150 individuals and families. Robin Powell and Jonathan Hollow are very grateful for their enthusiastic support for "Second Lives”.
Transcript of this podcast: https://www.evidenceinvestor.com/second-lives-living-the-dream-as-a-master-of-wine/ --
Links to key mentions in this podcast: “The Wines of Georgia” - https://www.amazon.co.uk/wines-Georgia-Infinite-Classic-Library/dp/1913022005/ --
“Granik’s Guide to Georgian Wines” - https://www.graniksguide.com/en/ —
Mulberry Bow financial planners: https://mulberrybow.com/ —
How To Fund The Life You Want: http://tinyurl.com/how2fund --
Picture of Lisa Granik by Giorgi Gegelia, Orkoli Winery
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Transcript
Introduction to Second Lives Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
I'm Jonathan Hollow, and welcome back to Second Lives, a series of 12 podcasts for the evidence-based investor looking at the questions raised by fresh directions in later life. When I started planning this series with Robin Powell, I was excited at the prospect of talking to 12 fascinating people who are either living out remarkable second lives or who are experts on money and meaning in later life.
00:00:27
Speaker
And I was particularly hoping I'd get a chance to have an in-depth conversation with this month's guest, Master of Wine, Lisa Granick. Lisa and I have some deeply felt common interest in the country of Georgia, in the Caucasus, and its ancient and proudly distinctive traditions of winemaking.
Lisa's Career Transition to Wine Mastery
00:00:47
Speaker
But Lisa is many times more knowledgeable than me about both topics and has so many interesting things to say about many more. Trained as an academic lawyer, she then took a turn towards wine and became a master of wine, one of the most sought after qualifications in the trade. Then she applied that expertise to Georgia, a country most people can't even locate on the map, let alone associate with wine.
00:01:14
Speaker
But as you will hear, Georgia is where wine started, and Lisa is having a major moment in the prime of her midlife, as she is now the foremost English-speaking expert on the wines of this intriguing and increasingly influential country.
Podcast Partnership with Mulberry Bow
00:01:31
Speaker
You are about to hear a conversation with an expert in many fields, covering purpose and meaning, sexism in the wine trade, Stalin, living across two countries, and much more besides.
00:01:45
Speaker
But just before we roll this interview with Lisa, I'd like to say a word about Mulberry Bow. This podcast is brought to you in collaboration with them. They are a chartered financial planning boutique in the city of London that offers a highly personalized service to around 150 individuals and families.
00:02:04
Speaker
Robin Powell and I like the fact that the team at Mulberry Bow do not have sales targets nor their own financial products to sell. As they like to say, they sit on your side of the table. For more information, just Google Mulberry Bow wealth planning or follow the links in the notes for this podcast. So now to Lisa Granick.
Updating the Georgian Wine Guide
00:02:29
Speaker
Lisa, I believe you're about to embark soon on one of your twice yearly trips to update your authoritative Granix guide to the wines of Georgia. Do you have a process you follow to keep up to date with such a fast-changing field?
00:02:44
Speaker
It will be Granix Wine Guide 2024, which will come out in the fall. I don't taste all of the wines alone. I have a panel, and so we're in the process of soliciting CDs for a group of new young Georgians to join me on the panel, as well as soliciting, you know, we're collecting the wines. So the four of us, five of us are going to meet to start tasting through the wines.
00:03:10
Speaker
There are also numerous wine festivals. I'm arriving in time for one of them. So the first three days, I will go and I'll meet with a lot of people and taste a lot of wines, not blind. Then I travel around and meet with people and have a sense of what's going on. I write up all of the committee's notes and our reviews of the wines.
00:03:32
Speaker
when there are questions about the wine after the judging has been done, often I write the producers that I know and do not know if I have questions about the wine, if I have questions about their vintage experience, or if I don't know them about how they got into the wine industry. And I follow up with that. To me, that sounds like a wonderful second life. It's fun. It's hard work, but it's fun.
00:03:58
Speaker
You've been working in wines for about 20 years now, and you are now, I think, a world authority on a subject close to your heart. I'd like to know, was there ever a moment of transition when you suddenly realized that this could happen or had happened?
Writing a Book on Georgian Wine
00:04:15
Speaker
In going back to Georgia a number of times between 2011 and 2015, as I saw the wine industry in Georgia develop, I realized that every single, any major wine area had a book about it. I realized that with my background, I was uniquely situated to write this book. My life has gone in a curious spiral fashion.
00:04:41
Speaker
I wanted to be an academic in different ways, and then all of a sudden I'm almost a wine academic in certain ways. And that allowed so much of my background in terms of my analytical skills and my research abilities and my background in the Soviet period, which the Georgians really didn't want to talk about, and my wine knowledge all could come together to work on this book. And what was the beginning of that spiral?
00:05:07
Speaker
I had finished my doctoral dissertation and I'd gotten my doctorate. And I was turning the first chapter of the dissertation into a book manuscript because Yale Press was interested in the book. And all of a sudden I realized that I just didn't want to do it anymore. I pushed myself away from my desk and walked downstairs. I really felt like Anna Karenina in some way. You know, you're at the station, you can change trains now. I ran into three acquaintances.
00:05:37
Speaker
and all three of them were successful legal academics, and all of them were miserable.
00:05:44
Speaker
It was very clear how stressed out and or angry they were. One looked like she had developed Tourette's or had just gotten out of Auschwitz and the other one was just very angry. I sat there at my desk and I thought, are you kidding? Is this where you want to be? Not one of these persons looks happy. And that was when I got up from my desk.
00:06:10
Speaker
And you know, I was lucky. I was on a, I was still on a fellowship. So I was able to take the time and rethink what I really might want to do in life. And I stepped back and I thought about my skill sets and languages and I thought, you know, what if I step back?
00:06:25
Speaker
to my late teens and didn't think about what my parents wanted me to do, didn't think of what I should do, didn't think of what I had to do, and tried to think of a career that somehow touched a lot of my interests and would be more than a job. And really, one day I was sitting on the subway. It was within a few weeks of saying, I'm going to read poetry, I'm going to read history, I'm going to read all the other things I wanted to read that I wasn't able to do because I was so focused on my legal career.
00:06:54
Speaker
I'd always collected wine, not in a super serious way, but because I was a student of Western European history. That was part of West European culture. So that's how that happened. And I spent some time and thought about it before I finally made the plunge.
First Impressions of Georgian Culture
00:07:09
Speaker
You and I know Georgia, but many of our listeners won't. It's a country at the far end of the Black Sea between Turkey and Russia. Can you try to capture why it has such a grip on your imagination? Well, I first went to Georgia as a young adult and I didn't realize, and this is something that's become more apparent with the current war in Ukraine,
00:07:31
Speaker
the degree to which our understanding of the Soviet Union and in particular these different republics, that they were really such different places. And I was really a student of Soviet studies and Russian studies. And we learned the Russian propaganda, Soviet propaganda of the friendship of the peoples. But I had no idea how truly distinct the Georgians were.
00:07:55
Speaker
And that was really eye-opening for me. It's a much warmer place relative to Russia in every single way. I developed some very deep friendships there, which has carried through my interest and care for that country ever since that time. And what about the food and the landscapes? Those are things that a lot of people talk about in relation to Georgia.
00:08:19
Speaker
Well, of course, the Georgians think they live in the most beautiful place on earth. I mean, it's a country, 85% of it is mountainous, so there are many dramatic views. The people themselves are really so filled with life, and they reflect that warmer Mediterranean culture, whether you go from Persia down into Greece,
00:08:43
Speaker
There is this warmth and expansiveness, vibrancy, and honestly, a love of partying and love of drinking that really enlivens and characterizes who and what they are.
00:09:00
Speaker
This is Jonathan Hollow and you're listening to Second Lives. I'm interviewing master of wine Lisa Granick about how she moved from law to wine and became a world expert on the wines of one particular country, Georgia.
00:09:15
Speaker
Let's turn to the wines. A lot of people, when they think about wine, will think about it revolving around, I don't know, France, Italy, the United States. If they're aware of Georgian wines at all, they'll probably think they're quite incidental to it. Are you able in some way to try and capture in words what makes these wines special to you?
00:09:36
Speaker
There are different styles of wine in Georgia. There are ones made in stainless steel and maybe some oak treatment that are in the European style. And then there are some that are made in the February, the so-called amber wines, the orange wines. They have amber color tones and they're made with an extended period of skin contact. That is a taste sensation if you've never had one before. And I usually say if you've never had umami or when you think back to the first time you've ever had
00:10:04
Speaker
beer or something like sea urchin, something very strange in your mouth, and you have to taste it a couple of times to wrap your mind around it. And this Quavri-style wine, which is made in a big clay amphora buried in the ground, it's a glimpse into the past, isn't it?
Historical Significance of Georgian Wine
00:10:23
Speaker
People say that drinking wine is fantastic because it's travel in a glass. You can go to a foreign place. Well, this is history in a glass. You can go back not to a foreign place, but to a very distant time. Nobody really thought much about wine much before France made its mark and its own brand as creating the greatest wines in the world.
00:10:44
Speaker
So those wines we thought were central to European culture because Georgia was part of the Soviet Union. We didn't have access. We didn't travel there. But if you go back in time, history really starts with where you start. Georgia is a window into what wines were like when wine making, when the grapevine was first domesticated.
00:11:07
Speaker
that look backwards to a pre-corporate, pre-industrial era brings Georgia to the fore. But it was only with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Georgian attempt to revive its wine culture and promote tourism to that area, along with a sort of, not so much back to the future, but back to the past and the people looking into the origins of wine making.
00:11:34
Speaker
First is the archaeological evidence that Georgia has taking wine making back 8,000 years. There's evidence in Armenia that is 6,000 years prior. And then the most recent genetic evidence has the
00:11:51
Speaker
domestication of the grapevine going back 11,000 years. One is in the Levant. These vines are primarily the precursors to Western European vines. But what occurred in the Trans Caucasus, namely George Armenia, Eastern Turkey, because that area was so geographically isolated, those vines stayed where they
00:12:15
Speaker
you had two big encounters with Georgia over the course of your life and one of them was all the way back in 1990. So can you describe how that happened and what you made of it? At the time I was practicing law and I wanted to make the leap into academia. I received a Fulbright scholarship to teach law and do some research in the Soviet Union. This was just before the Soviet Union fell apart and I was supposed to be at Moscow University.
00:12:45
Speaker
But you still need to go to Russia. You need an official invitation. And the Ministry of Education needed to issue the invitation, and I couldn't get one. I have a friend who did some research and found out, she said, it's not coming. Basically, the Ministry of Education is necrotic. If you can get yourself to the Soviet Union, we can get you to Moscow.
00:13:09
Speaker
So there had been a number of Georgian lawyers that I had worked with a few years prior and on some very early exchanges of Soviets to the United States. And I contacted a few of them and I said, Ramaz, I've gotten this fellowship. Can you get me an invitation?
00:13:26
Speaker
Sure, why not? And in typical Georgian fashion, they waited until there was an election and that was safe. And then as soon as the election happened, because the Soviet Union was literally falling apart, I got my invitation. I was able to book my ticket and I left within a very short order. I don't remember whether it was a week, two weeks.
00:13:50
Speaker
And I arrived in Tbilisi and was greeted by, in the middle of the night, by three close friends, some of whom I'm still close with today. I had been to the Soviet Union before, so that the Soviet part was not unusual to me. The Georgian part was completely foreign. People did not speak Russian everywhere, and I did not speak Georgian. And it was a question of what am I going to do there?
00:14:18
Speaker
I started to learn about Georgian, learn about that culture and figure out I met with the lawyers there to see what sort of topic I could lecture on that might be of use for them. But they really weren't very interested in hearing what I had to speak about. They were much more interested in having me as a fellow traveler and understand what Georgia was about and why it should be a free and independent country.
00:14:47
Speaker
Was it obvious to you at that point that Georgia was deeply distinctive or was that sense of distinctiveness grown as you got to know it better over the years?
00:14:58
Speaker
I began to understand how distinctive it was the first time I met some of my Georgian friends in the United States. I grew up with Armenians and not a lot, but a good number. I lived near an Armenian church and I saw the script and I knew the Georgian script and I thought they were similar. They're neighboring countries. I made the mistake of saying, oh, the languages are similar.
00:15:21
Speaker
never made that mistake again. And that was when the Georgians and this started to teach me one of the original alphabets, this, that, the other thing. And over the course of time, the depth of the distinction of the culture has only grown. And actually, since I've been going back and forth to Armenia,
00:15:41
Speaker
The distinction between these two countries and my understanding of those distinctions has grown. When you grew up and studied Russia, the Soviet Union, and Ukraine, we learned about this area through a Russian lens because either it was Russians who wrote the histories or even emigres who lived in Russia.
00:16:04
Speaker
or the Soviet Union, and they all bought the way in which Russia recreated its own history and understanding of its sphere of influence basically from the time of Peter the Great.
00:16:20
Speaker
Caucasian peoples, it's a completely different set of people. They look different. Arguably, they act different, but they certainly have their own ethos. And that's something that is very nuanced and something that I continue to learn about every time I go back.
Insights from Simon Bullock at Mulberry Bow
00:16:43
Speaker
Now for a word from Mulberry Bowe, who have collaborated with us to develop this series. I spoke to Simon Bullock of Mulberry Bowe. Does he ever feel it's right to encourage clients to say no so that they have the time and space to enjoy what they have? Here's what he had to say. That's a great question.
00:17:03
Speaker
No can be the most powerful word in English language at times, can't it? But we all seem to find it hard sometimes to turn down opportunities to do things when we're asked or prompt it. Many of the clients that we look after, they have or they have had in the past successful careers as business owners or city professionals. And that tends to mean they're a magnet.
00:17:25
Speaker
kinds of offers from friends or contacts. My main technique for helping them is just to manage that by sharing experiences that other clients have had.
00:17:34
Speaker
On an anonymous basis, of course, but still real-life examples that can be really helpful for them to understand the power of no. Simplicity can be its own reward sometimes, can't it? Thank you. That was Simon Bullock, the founder of Mulberry Bow. And now back to Lisa Granick with more about how she became a world expert on the wines of Georgia. So this first encounter with Georgia was before you turned away from your career as a legal academic.
00:18:03
Speaker
You did make that turn and I believe you began by wine waiting. I'm interested in the reactions of your family and friends to that turn.
00:18:13
Speaker
My first job in the wine business was actually as a wine rep. I was working for a distributor, an importer and distributor. And I started to do it part time because I was still involved in a number of academic projects. And my family was stunned and not
00:18:36
Speaker
I'm not going to say they were not supportive. They were stunned. And of course, my mother said, oh my God, you're going to throw away all of that education. Of course, some of which they had funded, some of which I had funded. But I basically said, you know, I wasn't happy and I wasn't fully committed and I wanted to see where it would lead me.
00:18:58
Speaker
But my father ultimately found that it was amusing. He liked wine himself. And my father was basically proud of whatever I did. But it took some time for them to wrap their head around it. Not sure that they ever fully did. They certainly were very proud when I became an MW, though they didn't necessarily understand what that was.
Master of Wine Certification Process
00:19:21
Speaker
So M.W. is Master of Wine. Correct. And for listeners who don't know it, it's an extraordinarily demanding and rare qualification. Can you tell me a little bit about the process of studying for it and how long that took?
00:19:36
Speaker
Well, when I started in the wine business and having left my legal career, I'm not the sort of person that says, oh, I collect wine, I love wine, and I'm going to tell you all about it. I would have suffered from real unposter syndrome, and I felt like I needed some education to have some authority to tell people which wine I thought they should buy or drink.
00:20:01
Speaker
So I started through some friends, I found out about the Wine and Spirits Education Trust, and I started to pursue that. And so I went through that program through the diploma, which takes about four years. And after the diploma, I thought usually I thought that was all I was going to do. But my sister's brother-in-law is a master of wine, Nick Adams, based in the UK.
00:20:23
Speaker
And so that was how I heard about the MW. And then I started the MW in 2001 and 2002, and became an MW in 2006. So it was about three and a half, four years.
00:20:40
Speaker
Master of wine is a very international qualification. You certainly could have used it to work in France or Italy, and you're a great lover of Western European culture. But you said to me that you felt that by working on the wines of Georgia, you could move the needle more. Can you just explain what you mean by that?
Economic Impact of Georgian Wine Promotion
00:21:03
Speaker
Sure. I mean, and this goes back to being a citizen of the world and I went to a Jesuit university. There is this notion of leaving the world, doing something beyond yourself in your life. And a lot of people I know in the wine industry sometimes wonder what they're doing because they're, yes, they're having fun, but they're moving boxes. And I felt that I had the opportunity when you look at Georgia
00:21:27
Speaker
It's a poor country. It's an agricultural country that was denied its self-determination for a great period of time. It's not like Italy with lots of pasta or cheeses.
00:21:44
Speaker
It really doesn't have, or car industries. I mean, you name a powerhouse that drives various economies. Georgia doesn't have that. And as Georgia wants to become outside of the Russian yoke and wants to be
00:22:01
Speaker
an integral part of the Western European community, developing a viable wine business and a wine tourism business is a key part to allowing Georgia to come into the modern world
00:22:17
Speaker
less dependent on a very big bearish neighbor. I think it was Kim Anderson, an economist from Australia who noted that when economists look at an economy, an economy is based in three different sectors, there's agriculture, manufacturing, and services, and wine
00:22:38
Speaker
trans covers all of these. So when you support the wine industry, you're really promoting all of these aspects of a national economy. And so I think I can slightly move the needle a little bit. Georgians are very proud people and I can help them think about ways in which to make their wines compete with other wines of the world.
00:23:04
Speaker
The MW is practical and scholarly. I'm interested in your views about scholarship and wine. When you wrote The Wines of Georgia, which is a very substantial book,
00:23:18
Speaker
you had to not just interpret the wines of Georgia for Western readers, but get behind some myths and understand the influences of the Soviet Union on Georgian history. And I think you found this, you know, a troubled topic, even a taboo topic in some places.
00:23:35
Speaker
In so far as Georgia is concerned, people don't like to talk about the Soviet period. And in the wine category, they certainly blame Stalin and the Soviet economy for destroying the biodiversity of their multiple, their hundreds of different grapes and creating factory wines rather than a niche wine industry. I had to demonstrate to them that there's evidence that
00:24:01
Speaker
If not for Stalin, Georgia's winemaking industry might have been like Moldova's and largely ceded over to European grape varieties or in Armenia, developing varieties that were for brandy. But because Stalin liked wine and in particular was strongly Georgian and liked specific Georgian wines, decisions were taken to privilege, first of all, wine in Georgia during the Soviet period.
00:24:28
Speaker
and Georgian great varieties during the Soviet period. That's a point that I, you know, a thesis I have in the book that Georgians listened to and they were a little uncomfortable with it. They don't say absolutely not. They say, no, should live or maybe could be.
00:24:46
Speaker
The world of wine is changing, but it has had lots of men working in it and running it.
Challenges of Sexism in the Wine Industry
00:24:53
Speaker
What's your experience been like of that in the United States and in Georgia? Terrible. It's been problematic from the beginning. I'm not going to mince words about it. I had men who certainly assisted me
00:25:12
Speaker
at different points in time and even mentored me to a certain extent. There is no question that there were jobs I did not get. There were buyers who would not buy wine from me unless I slept with them.
00:25:30
Speaker
There were things that were said about me because I was a woman of a certain stripe. And it continues. I was bullied. I'm not going to say it was easy. What signs have you noticed of change? In Georgia, for example, I know there are some really great wineries run by women.
00:25:53
Speaker
Being a woman has not been so problematic. In Georgia, there have been more women now that are running their own wineries. And there's a bit of, I'll say, a sisterhood about that. And they are successful. I think the Georgians embrace me because they know that I have been involved in their country and in doing, trying to, encouraging the best for their country for well over 30 years.
00:26:22
Speaker
And even now I'm somewhat mythic because I lived in Georgia during very dark times. You know, Georgia's many, many of the leaders now weren't even alive when I was there. And I was there, you know, when the Soviet Union was falling apart and there was no electricity, there was no heating, foodstuffs. It was for the first time a wealthy country that could always see itself didn't have food. And I was there and came back and they couldn't believe that I did this.
00:26:48
Speaker
So they recognize that I have a history of love and care. And for that reason, I've been told that I'm a friend of Georgia and that has eased my way. Not least I have close friends outside of the wine industry. So I have insight into the country outside of just the wine business.
00:27:12
Speaker
In the United States, the large expanse of the wine business is still overwhelmingly run by men. Surely there are lots of women's organizations in the wine business. I'm sustained by it because I mentor a lot of women. I actually had a woman ask me, she's suffering from certain issues right now, and she asked me, does it get better? I mean, she was hoping I would say, oh no, by the time you're, I don't know, 40 or something, it's fine.
00:27:38
Speaker
She said, wow, you know, okay, I need to adjust my expectations.
Balancing Life Between the US and Georgia
00:27:58
Speaker
You've got many close friends in Georgia and you've got a considerable attachment to it in all sorts of ways. You live on the East Coast of the United States, so I'm interested in what it's like to have those threads connecting you to somewhere that is relatively far away and relatively demanding to get to.
00:28:19
Speaker
It's very far away and quite a challenge to get to. It's a wholly different experience now through, I hate to say it, but Facebook and WhatsApp, because there are people that I communicate with on a semi-regular basis and whether we see each other on a screen or we're texting back and forth, there's that level of continuity and some of us know what's going on in each other's lives. On the other hand,
00:28:49
Speaker
It's a peculiar thing. I go back to Georgia for about a month at a time, twice a year. And each time I go back, I'm living with people that I was very close with for 30 years, and I still live in the same neighborhood. And I leave my family in the United States behind.
00:29:07
Speaker
But I'm going back and this is one of those spirals again I go back and I'm back as a young adult in a place that I first went to When I was alone as a young adult because there was no internet you could not even to you know Even to have a phone call you had to go to the main post office to make an international phone call But walking the streets. I'm back in a headspace and
00:29:32
Speaker
of my young adulthood. And that's a very comfortable place to be. So I'm in the same place, a different place. Life has moved on. I have changed. I have not changed. And I spend a lot of time thinking about it. It's a comfortable place to be. It's like an old pair of shoes. I see my youth and I see my middle age.
00:29:56
Speaker
you don't end up feeling too much nostalgia for things that have been lost in Georgia since you first went there.
00:30:05
Speaker
Well, there are absolutely some things that are lost, but the Soviet system had more bad things than good things. And so I'm not nostalgic for most of it. One of the greatest things of the Soviet times was what was called the kitchen culture. There was nowhere to go and you were afraid of whether your room was bugged and people sat in their kitchens and talked and whether it was over tea or Georgia was over wine.
00:30:35
Speaker
And Georgia still has a kitchen culture. You still get together at table and you eat and you drink. And I mean, people aren't necessarily outside singing in the balconies the way they used to. But the kitchen culture still is there. So that human element that was there in the Soviet period is still there in Georgia. And that's a testament more to the Georgian character.
00:30:56
Speaker
Do you feel that all this contact with Georgia has changed you and changed your values or do you think you are attracted to Georgia or have ended up close to Georgia because there's something there that was already in line with your values? Well, Georgians certainly
00:31:19
Speaker
There's more counterpoint, not so much a similarity. There's a wild abandon in the Georgian character. I'm more controlled. So I envy that.
00:31:38
Speaker
But I think that there is a commitment, there's still an old school commitment to family and relationships. And the other deepest thing about it, I think has to do with the fact that I'm Jewish. And I see two ancient cultures.
00:31:58
Speaker
living in hostile worlds or in hostile places in the world, but very tiny cultures. And each culture feels that they have contributed something to the world in their own different way, to different cultures that at root each feel that their culture matters.
00:32:16
Speaker
And I'd hate for the whole world to be entirely homogenous.
Cultural Parallels: Georgian and Jewish Values
00:32:21
Speaker
And I respect the Georgians' attempt to fight and maintain their own sense of self in the way that, you know, I certainly come from a culture that I believe matters and has contributed a great deal to humanity. Beautifully expressed. Lisa, will you just finish by telling us about the wines of Georgia, what people can expect if they buy it and read it?
00:32:45
Speaker
It's an attempt to understand the culture, the history, and the individual terroirs where most of the grapes are grown, as well as the personalities. I mean, I really focus on different kinds of producers, whether they are very large or very small. Some of the tiny producers are of a certain style or wedded to a particular terroir that they're trying to understand.
00:33:12
Speaker
I enjoyed it very much. It's a book I highly recommend, not just about the wines of Georgia, but actually about Georgia more generally because you bring so many dimensions of it in. Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate your support from cheering far away when I was in Georgia or when I've been here in New York or here in New Jersey where I actually am at the moment, wherever your support is greatly appreciated. Thank you.
00:33:39
Speaker
So that was Lisa
Conclusion and Next Episode Preview
00:33:40
Speaker
Granick. I hope you now have a sense of why she is such a hit in Georgia, and with me. If you've enjoyed this episode, please bookmark this podcast in your app, so that you don't miss the next episode of Second Lives. In my next episode, I'll be speaking to Hector Garthia about his multi-million best-selling book Ikigai, which has been translated into a remarkable 70 languages.
00:34:05
Speaker
Ikigai focuses on long lives in Japan and the word roughly means someone's reason for living. Hector has some very interesting things to say about what he has observed, about what gets people up, about and involved with each other in Japanese culture.
00:34:22
Speaker
And I'd like to thank again, Mulberry Bow, the Chartered Financial Planning Boutique in the City of London that has worked with us to develop this series. For more information, just Google Mulberry Bow Wealth Planning. Follow the links in the notes for this podcast.