The Wine Route: Five Days Among the Qvevri

Georgia has made wine in buried clay Qvevri for around eight thousand years, and Kakheti is where that tradition is easiest to taste — not in a museum, but at tables where the winemaker does the pouring. This is the shape we use for wine-first trips. It assumes you would rather sit long in three cellars than tick off nine, and that somebody else is doing the driving, so nobody has to spit. When we plan yours, the cellars change with the season and with what you like in your glass.

Day 1 — Over the Gombori pass, glass in hand by evening

We collect you in Tbilisi after breakfast and take the wooded road over the Gombori pass, dropping into the Alazani valley with the Caucasus stacked along the far side. There is a first cellar stop en route — a gentle one, to set the vocabulary: Qvevri, marani, amber. By evening you are on Sighnaghi’s walls watching the light go, a glass of rkatsiteli somewhere near your hand.

Day 2 — Pheasant’s Tears, and the afternoon it deserves

The morning belongs to Pheasant’s Tears in Sighnaghi — the tasting our guests write to us about afterwards — where the wines come up from the clay tasting of orchards and stone, and lunch keeps arriving until it is officially supper. We plan nothing else today on purpose. You will understand by the second glass.

Day 3 — Small marani, big table

Today is for the family cellars: a small marani where the winemaker opens the Qvevri himself, explains why his grandfather buried them exactly there, and pours saperavi so dark it stains the toasts. This is wine still made at home, the way Georgian families have always made it, and the winemaker will happily walk you through his own methods — the press, the clay, the waiting. Between visits there are vines to walk and a village lunch under a walnut tree. In the evening, supper with amber wine — kisi or mtsvane on its skins — which is where most guests stop taking notes and start taking bottles.

Day 4 — Telavi, the valley floor and one cellar more

Telavi’s morning market first: cheese, spice cones, tklapi fruit leather and the noble nine-hundred-year-old plane tree that shades half a square. Then along the valley floor — Alaverdi cathedral standing alone against the mountains, wine still made within its walls — and one more cellar, or none, if the terrace at your guesthouse has already won the argument.

Day 5 — A slow goodbye to the valley

A last unhurried morning among the vines — a walk, a coffee, one bottle you are still deciding about — then the drive back over the pass to Tbilisi for a final supper in the old town, somewhere the wine list agrees with everything you learned this week.

Day 6 — Home

Bottles wrapped properly for the flight, addresses of every marani in your pocket, and our number still in your WhatsApp for the day you decide the cellar needs a second visit.