Today I learned that drinking beer in Tbilisi city centre is cheaper than drinking tea. Whilst in the afternoon in a cellar bar on the main drag, Rustaveli Avenue, we bought a litre of local white wine for two quid. And between the top and the bottom of that jug I fell in love with Georgia.

It wasn’t just the cheap wine that did it, of course. It was also a wander round the romantically dilapidated streets of the quiet old town, and also the taste of a pot of lobiani on an autumn day, and also a visit to the coolest café we’ve ever seen, and also the fact that in the bar they played Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen. All of these wonderful things combined to make me fall in love with Georgia….but mostly it was the cheap wine.

In the old town I went looking, without success, for a Georgian knight’s costume for my nephew. But what I did find there was amazing. Beautiful streets full of elegantly houses covered in crumbling plaster and seemingly held together by rickety, rotting outside staircases. On the first floor crumbling balconies clung on to their hosts for dear life, trying to avoid collapsing onto the people below. Coming from Liverpool I’ve got a natural love of beautiful old buildings falling into disrepair.

In one street we found the Linville Café. Access was up a flight of stairs and entering the florally wallpapered space inside was like visiting your nan’s house, if your nan was an eccentric Georgian artist with upside down lamps hanging from her ceiling and Belle and Sebastian on the stereo. The song was one I hadn’t heard before, “My Wandering Days Are Over” and mine nearly are, and if Liverpool was as cool as Tbilisi, and the wine was as cheap, they probably would be for ever…