Itinerary · for one

Georgia · the cradle of wine

A solo loop through the cradle of wine in rtveli season · nine nights · autumn 2027. Three nights in Tbilisi for the supra feast at Barbarestan from Barbare Jorjadze”s 1874 recipes, sulphur baths in Abanotubani, and amber Rkatsiteli at 8000 Vintages. A day-stop at Mtskheta for Jvari Monastery above the confluence of the Mtkvari and Aragvi, and Saperavi straight from the cellar at Chateau Mukhrani. Two nights in Telavi for rtveli at Tsinandali and the 7.7-kilometre Khareba tunnel cellar drilled into the mountain, with Kisi and Mtsvane from Alaverdi”s monks. One night in Sighnaghi on the cliff for Pheasant”s Tears, John Wurdeman”s natural-wine pioneer, and Bodbe Monastery”s spring at St Nino”s tomb. Two nights at Stepantsminda for the climb to Gergeti Trinity under Mount Kazbek, lobiani in the Sno valley, and a final chacha at the Cross Pass before the highway drops back to Tbilisi.

1 traveler 5 bases 9 nights 11 min read

v1 · May 12, 2026

Oct 2 · Day 1 · the first one

Wheels down at Tbilisi. Then rtveli, the harvest.

Out of Hong Kong on a Friday, Tbilisi by Saturday morning. October — rtveli season, the grape harvest, when the qvevri are unsealed, Saperavi runs the colour of bull''s blood, and every Kakhetian courtyard smells of crushed Rkatsiteli skins. Nine nights through the country that has been making wine for eight thousand years — three in Tbilisi for the supra and the sulphur baths, one in Mtskheta at the confluence, two in Telavi to put bare feet into the satsnakheli press, one on the cliff at Sighnaghi for Pheasant''s Tears, and two in the Caucasus at Stepantsminda where Mount Kazbek leans over Gergeti Trinity at five thousand metres.

Begin the journey ↓

Oct 2 → Oct 11 · 9 nights · 5 bases · 290 km between bases

Chapter 01 · Oct 2–4 Days 1–3

Tbilisi · the supra and the sulphur

Three nights settling into the city that drinks. Amber Rkatsiteli in a clay cup, sulphur steam off the bath houses, khachavuri boats with the yolk still molten, and a tamada raising the third toast of the night.

3 nights

Fly Hong Kong (HKG) → Tbilisi (TBS) · via Istanbul or Doha · ~14 hr door to door

Cash GEL lari from the airport ATM · Bolt for taxis, marshrutka shared vans for short hops

Things to do

Supra at Barbarestan · recipes from Barbare Jorjadze's 1874 cookbook · book a week ahead
Amber Rkatsiteli flight at 8000 Vintages · six months on the skins in qvevri · ask for the Pheasant's Tears
Khinkali at Pasanauri or Sakhli #11 · hold by the topknot, sip the broth first, never pierce the dumpling
Three khachapuri in one sitting · imeruli flat, megruli with cheese on top, adjaruli boat with egg and butter
Sulphur baths at Abanotubani · private cabin at Chreli Abano · scrub by the kisi master after the soak

Old Town hotels are atmospheric but Friday nights on Erekle II run loud until 3am · ask for a courtyard-facing room · the funicular to Mtatsminda runs late for the city lights

Bookings

flight HKG → TBS · outbound via Istanbul or Doha · ~14hr pending

hotel Tbilisi Old Town · 3 nights · courtyard-facing room pending

Stamba District / Rooms Hotel / Communal — boutique tier near Rustaveli

activity Barbarestan supra · table for one · book a week ahead pending

Chapter 01 · the story

Tbilisi has been built and burned and rebuilt twenty-nine times on the same set of hills, and still the alphabet on the shopfronts looks like it was drawn this morning. Three scripts, thirty-three letters, none of them shaped like anything else on earth.

Read the story Collapse

The script is the first thing. Mkhedruli on every sign — the loops and the long descenders that look like a child’s drawing of a violin. Two older alphabets, Asomtavruli and Nuskhuri, still survive on the lintels of churches. Three scripts for one language, all of them invented here, none of them looking like Latin or Cyrillic or Arabic. The country has been on the road between Persia and Russia for fifteen centuries and the letters are its proof that it never quite became either.

Abanotubani is the brick-domed quarter at the bottom of the Old Town where the sulphur springs come up at forty degrees. The bath houses are half-buried in the ground, only the domes showing, and the air above them smells like a struck match. Inside a private cabin at Chreli Abano the water is the colour of weak tea and the kisi master arrives in shorts with a coarse mitt and works the dead skin off the shoulders in long strokes that sting and then, oddly, stop stinging. Pushkin wrote that he had never in his life encountered anything more luxurious than the baths of Tiflis. He is still correct.

The supra at Barbarestan runs four hours and the tamada — the appointed toastmaster, who at our table is the owner’s brother — toasts the dead, then the parents, then the children not yet born, then peace, then the women, in that order, with a horn of Saperavi each time. The recipes are Barbare Jorjadze’s, written in 1874, a Georgian noblewoman who published the country’s first cookbook the same year she was campaigning for women’s suffrage. The chicken in walnut sauce is the dish she wrote down for her daughter. It is still being cooked from the same notebook.

Past midnight the funicular up Mtatsminda is still running. The city below is a quiet bowl of yellow lights along the Mtkvari, and the Sameba cathedral on the far ridge is lit gold. The wine bars on Erekle II are open until three.

Chapter 02 · Oct 5 Day 4

Mtskheta · the confluence and the cellar

A short hop north to the old capital, where the Mtkvari meets the Aragvi and Saperavi runs the colour of garnet from the Mukhrani cellars. One night to pivot east into Kakheti.

1 night

Drive Tbilisi → Mtskheta · ~25 km · 30 min · or marshrutka from Didube

Pickup rental car for the wine-country and Kazbegi loop from a Tbilisi agency

Things to do

Jvari Monastery on the ridge · the confluence of the Mtkvari and Aragvi below at sunset
Svetitskhoveli Cathedral · the Living Pillar · seat of the Georgian Orthodox Church
Chateau Mukhrani tasting · Saperavi and Tavkveri from the 1876 royal cellar of Prince Ivane Mukhranbatoni
Lunch at Salobie · the village kitchen famous for lobio bean stew with mchadi cornbread
Shio-Mgvime cave monastery · cliff-cut cells, 6th century, the back road from Mtskheta

Mtskheta hotels are small and family-run · most travellers day-trip from Tbilisi but the morning light on Jvari before the coaches arrive is worth a night · pick up the rental car here so the wine-country leg starts fresh

Bookings

rental Compact car · pickup Tbilisi, return Tbilisi · 6 days pending

Manual common; ask for automatic if needed. International permit recommended.

hotel Mtskheta guesthouse · 1 night · old-town proximity pending

activity Chateau Mukhrani tour and tasting · afternoon slot pending

Chapter 02 · the story

Inside the pillar at Svetitskhoveli, the legend says, lies Christ's robe — buried with a Georgian Jew named Elias who carried it home from Golgotha. The cathedral is built around the spot. The whole country, in a way, is built around the spot.

Read the story Collapse

Mtskheta sat at the confluence of the Mtkvari and the Aragvi for a thousand years before Tbilisi existed, and from the ridge at Jvari the two rivers still meet exactly where they did when the chronicles were written — the muddy Mtkvari from the south, the clearer Aragvi from the north, the seam between them visible for half a kilometre before they finally mix. Saint Nino raised a wooden cross on this ridge in the fourth century. The sixth-century stone monastery above the cross is small and almost unfurnished inside, and from the parapet the whole tiled old town sits in the bend below.

The cathedral down in the town is called Svetitskhoveli — the Living Pillar — and the name turns on a story. A cedar grew on Elias’s burial place, the legend goes, and when they tried to fell it for the church the central pillar floated in the air until Nino prayed it down. The pillar is in there still, encased in stone in the nave. Pilgrims rest a hand on it on the way past. The fresco above shows the column hanging in the air with angels around it, and a small panel in the corner shows a sculptor’s severed hand — the architect’s, in the story, cut off by King Giorgi I so he could never build anything more beautiful.

Out in the village of Mukhrani the royal cellar of Prince Ivane Mukhranbatoni was built in 1876 and rebuilt after the Soviets in 2002. The Saperavi comes out of the barrel almost black, the colour of pomegranate molasses, and the host pours it into a horn rather than a glass because that is the older shape. The lobio at Salobie down the road is bean stew with mchadi cornbread on the side. The recipe is just beans, walnuts, blue fenugreek, and time.

Chapter 03 · Oct 6–7 Days 5–6

Telavi · rtveli in Kakheti

Two nights in the eastern wine heartland during rtveli — the grape harvest. Bare feet in the satsnakheli press, Saperavi staining the clay to the elbows, monks sealing qvevri at Alaverdi, and a 7.7-kilometre tunnel of bottles drilled into the side of a mountain.

2 nights

Drive Mtskheta → Telavi · ~120 km · 2.5 hr · via the Gombori Pass

Season rtveli runs late September into mid-October · book a harvest day with a small producer

Things to do

Tsinandali Estate of Prince Chavchavadze · first Georgian to bottle wine European-style 1812 · the original cellar
Khareba tunnel cellar · 7.7 km of bottle-lined corridors drilled into the Caucasus foothills
Alaverdi Monastery cellar · 11th-century · the monks still ferment in qvevri buried under the church
Rtveli harvest day with Schuchmann or Twins Wine Cellar · stomping in the satsnakheli, lunch at the long table
Ikalto Academy wine museum · the school where Shota Rustaveli studied, vineyards still on the terraces

Kakhetian guesthouses run on the supra principle — every meal is a feast with the host as tamada · pace the chacha · the qvevri tastings start at 10am and never really stop

Bookings

hotel Telavi guesthouse · 2 nights · vineyard view pending

Schuchmann Wines / Lopota Lake Resort / a Kvareli family guesthouse

activity Rtveli harvest day · half-day with a small producer · grape stomping + qvevri pressing pending

activity Khareba tunnel tour and tasting · 5-glass flight pending

Chapter 03 · the story

The qvevri is the egg-shaped clay amphora buried to its neck in the floor of the cellar, sealed at the harvest, opened at the spring. Georgians have been making wine in them for eight thousand years. The method is older than the wheel.

Read the story Collapse

A qvevri holds anywhere from three hundred litres to three thousand, and the cellar at Alaverdi is a low stone room with eight of them buried up to the rim under the church floor. The monks have been sealing wine here since the eleventh century. Saperavi grapes go in whole — skins, stems, pips, everything — and the clay does the rest. Six months later the qvevri is unsealed with a wooden mallet, the wax cracked away, and a long-handled gourd is dropped through the neck to draw the first cup. The wine that comes up is the colour of old garnet and tastes of dried cherry, walnut skin, and the inside of a stone jar.

Rtveli is the harvest, and rtveli is also the party that goes with it. At a small producer in the foothills above Telavi the morning is bare feet in a hollowed-log press called a satsnakheli, treading fifty kilos of Saperavi until the juice is at the ankle and the hands are stained black to the elbow. The lunch that follows is the long table the country lives on — pkhali in three colours, mtsvadi grilled over vine cuttings, khinkali pinched at the top twenty pleats to a dumpling — and the host stands at the head and delivers the toasts in the proper Kakhetian sequence: to the dead, to the living, to the harvest, to the children, to peace.

Tsinandali is half an hour east, the estate where Prince Alexandre Chavchavadze bottled the first European-style Georgian wine in 1812 — a polymath who fought Napoleon, translated Byron into Georgian, and built a vineyard library of sixteen thousand bottles that the Bolsheviks confiscated and the Russians eventually mostly returned. The walk through the gardens ends in a tasting room with the family crest above the bar.

The Khareba cellar, an hour west, is a different scale: a Soviet ammunition tunnel drilled 7.7 kilometres into the side of the Caucasus foothills, now lined floor-to-ceiling with bottles at a constant twelve degrees. The guide hands over a five-glass flight. Outside the tunnel mouth the mountains are already golden.

Chapter 04 · Oct 8 Day 7

Sighnaghi · the cliff and the natural wine

One night on the cliff above the Alazani Valley, the Caucasus running blue along the far rim. John Wurdeman pours Rkatsiteli the colour of old amber at Pheasant's Tears and the city walls hold a kilometre of sunset.

1 night

Drive Telavi → Sighnaghi · ~60 km · 1 hr 15 · via Gurjaani

Name Sighnaghi means "shelter" in Turkic · the wall has 23 towers, all named for villages it once protected

Things to do

Pheasant's Tears · John Wurdeman's natural-wine pioneer · amber Rkatsiteli, Kisi, Chinuri from qvevri
Bodbe Monastery · tomb of St Nino who brought Christianity to Georgia 337 AD · the spring below the cloister
Sighnaghi wall walk · 4 km of 18th-century rampart, all 23 towers, the Alazani Valley laid out below
Okros Wines tasting room · small-batch Saperavi and Mtsvane from the Khashmi vineyards
Dinner at Pheasant's Tears restaurant · the Wurdeman kitchen pairs each course with a different qvevri wine

Sighnaghi is tiny and walkable but the cliff hotels fill up on weekends with Tbilisi day-trippers · ask for a valley-facing balcony · sunrise over the Caucasus from the wall is worth the early alarm

Bookings

hotel Sighnaghi cliff hotel · 1 night · valley-facing balcony pending

Kabadoni / Brigitte / Pheasant's Tears guesthouse — small-property tier

activity Pheasant's Tears dinner · tasting menu with qvevri pairing · book ahead pending

Chapter 04 · the story

Sighnaghi is a walled hilltop town with a 24-hour wedding chapel, four kilometres of 18th-century rampart, and the Alazani Valley falling away to a wall of Caucasus white on the far horizon. The eloping couples come at midnight. The wall has been there since 1762.

Read the story Collapse

King Erekle II built the wall in 1762 to shelter the villages of the Kakhetian plain from the Lezgin raids out of Dagestan. There are twenty-three towers, each one named for the village it once protected, and the rampart runs four kilometres around the hilltop. The walk takes an hour. From the southern bastion the Alazani Valley sits a thousand metres below in vineyards and poplars, and on a clear October morning the Greater Caucasus runs the entire length of the far horizon — Tetnuldi, Shkhara, Kazbek somewhere off to the north-west — all of it white above the snowline.

Down at Bodbe Monastery the spring at the foot of the cloister is where Saint Nino is buried. She walked into the country in the year 320 from Cappadocia, carrying a cross woven from grape vines tied with her own hair — the shape of the Georgian cross ever since, the cross-arms drooping at the ends — and converted King Mirian over a hunting accident. The spring below the monastery is cold enough to numb the wrists. A queue of women in headscarves fills plastic bottles to take home. The grave is under a small chapel up the path.

Pheasant’s Tears is John Wurdeman’s natural-wine bar at the top of the town. Wurdeman is an American painter from Virginia who came to Sighnaghi for the polyphony, married a Georgian dancer, and started making qvevri wine in 2007 from forgotten varietals the Soviets had ripped out — Tavkveri, Chinuri, Shavkapito — no sulphites, no filtering, no temperature control. The amber Rkatsiteli is six months on the skins and tastes of dried apricot and black tea. The kitchen below pairs each glass with a course built on what the village brought in that morning.

The 24-hour wedding chapel is on the main square. Couples drive up from Tbilisi after midnight, sign the register, and drive back at dawn. The window is always lit.

Chapter 05 · Oct 9–10 Days 8–9

Kazbegi · under Mount Kazbek

Two nights at the head of the Georgian Military Highway, where the Caucasus rear up to five thousand metres and Gergeti Trinity sits on its slope like a stone crown. Lobiani at the bakery, mountain trout from the Terek, and a chacha lodge at the Cross Pass.

2 nights

Drive Sighnaghi → Stepantsminda · ~330 km · 6 hr · back via Tbilisi then north on the Military Highway

Pass Jvari (Cross) Pass 2379m · check the road status in October · early snow possible

Things to do

Gergeti Trinity Church · 1 hr hike or 4×4 up the dirt road · Mount Kazbek 5054m on the skyline
Lobiani at the Stepantsminda bakery · bean-stuffed bread, still warm, with mountain butter
Sno Valley and Juta hike · the cliff-perched Roshka pinnacles, last guesthouses before the alpine border
Truso Valley travertine springs · iron-orange mineral mounds, abandoned Ossetian towers, picnic with chacha
Ananuri fortress on the Jinvali reservoir · the stop on the way back · the two churches above the turquoise water

Stepantsminda is high altitude (1740m) · the Rooms Kazbegi has the famous floor-to-ceiling window onto the mountain but charges for it · book a room with a Kazbek view, not a courtyard view · the weather flips fast in October, pack a shell

Bookings

hotel Stepantsminda lodge · 2 nights · Kazbek-facing room pending

Rooms Hotel Kazbegi tier; ask for west-facing for the alpenglow

activity 4×4 to Gergeti Trinity trailhead · one-way drop, hike down pending

flight TBS → HKG · return via Istanbul or Doha · evening departure day 10 pending

Chapter 05 · the story

Tsminda Sameba — the Trinity Church — sits at 2,170 metres on a green saddle above Gergeti village, and behind it Mount Kazbek rises another two thousand eight hundred and eighty-four metres in a single white wall. Prometheus, the locals say, is chained inside.

Read the story Collapse

The Georgian Military Highway is two hundred and eight kilometres of two-lane road from Tbilisi to the Russian border at Dariali, and it has been the only land route between the Caucasus and the plain since the Roman empire. The road climbs through Ananuri on its turquoise reservoir, over the Jvari Cross Pass at 2,379 metres where the truck queues for the Russian customs stretch back kilometres, down through the lunar travertine of Truso, and finally into Stepantsminda — the dusty highway town at 1,740 metres that everyone simply calls Kazbegi, after the mountain.

Kazbek is a stratovolcano, dormant for two thousand years, the seventh-highest peak in the Caucasus at 5,054 metres. In Greek myth this is the rock Prometheus was chained to for stealing fire — an eagle eating his liver every morning, the liver growing back every night, the cycle running for thirty thousand years. In the local Vainakh version it is Amirani, the same hero with a different name, with the same eagle and the same liver. The mountain wears the story in white, and on a clear morning at six the summit is pink for about eleven minutes before the cloud moves in.

The Tsminda Sameba church sits on its saddle at 2,170 metres, built in the fourteenth century from blocks of grey stone that match the mountain. The path up from Gergeti village is an hour and a quarter on foot through cow pastures, or fifteen minutes in a 4×4 Mitsubishi Delica with the suspension flogged out of it. The church is small inside, a single low-vaulted room with two candles and a priest who locks the door at sunset. There is no power at the top. The light is whatever the sky is doing.

Down in the town the bakery at the petrol station turns out lobiani — bean-stuffed bread, the size of a dinner plate, still warm — for four lari. The Terek river runs through the gorge behind, fast and grey-green, on its way to the Caspian. A flask of homemade chacha is offered at every guesthouse. The road home is the same one, in reverse.

Oct 11 · Day 10 · the last one

Last chacha at the Cross Pass. Then the flight home.

Final evening winding back down the Georgian Military Highway, Ananuri on the reservoir behind, a flask of homemade chacha in the door pocket and the taste of lobiani still on the tongue. Tbilisi by night for one last khinkali at Pasanauri — hold by the topknot, sip the broth, never pierce the dumpling. Nine nights, four wine regions, a dozen qvevri tasted from the clay. Gaumarjos — the tamada''s last toast already half-remembered.

↑ Back to the start View on the map →