Kakheti

Kakheti is Georgia’s wine country, spread across the wide Alazani valley in the east, an hour and a half by car from Tbilisi. Georgia has the oldest winemaking tradition known anywhere — the earliest traces, some eight thousand years old, came out of the ground just south of Tbilisi — and Kakheti is where that tradition still lives, in family cellars rather than factories.

Most trips here settle around two towns. Sighnaghi is the walled hill town above the valley, with long views to the Caucasus and a quiet worth staying a night for. Telavi, the old capital of the region, is the working market town at its centre and the base for the cellars and monasteries around it — Alaverdi, Gremi, and the family maranis in the villages between.

The word to know is Qvevri: the beeswax-lined clay vessel, buried to the neck, in which the juice ferments on its skins for months and turns amber. We arrange tastings with the people who actually make the bottle, at a table with bread and cheese rather than across a counter, so an afternoon here tends to run long.

Kakheti is at its best in late September and October, during rtveli, the grape harvest, when the villages turn to picking and pressing and the churchkhela is strung up to dry. It is the warmest week of the Georgian year to travel. Spring and early summer are green and gentle; winter is bare, though the cellars stay open.

It suits anyone who likes to eat and drink slowly — a couple, wine-minded friends, a family happy to spend a day among vines. We send a private driver so no one has to watch the road or the clock.