There are places you drink wine, and there are places wine drinks you. Georgia is the second kind.

Not the Georgia with Waffle House and SEC football—no, the other one, wedged between the Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea, where people have been fermenting grapes since before they had the decency to invent written language or hangovers. You don’t just visit this Georgia for “wine tasting.” You submit yourself to an 8,000-year-old, civilization-wide experiment in controlled intoxication and radical hospitality, and hope you come out the other side with your liver and your sanity mostly intact.

This is wine tourism in Georgia: not a hobby, not a weekend diversion, but a full-contact, multi-day immersion into a culture that believes God Himself enjoyed a glass and probably left His sandals somewhere in Kakheti after a supra that went on three days too long.

Buckle up. The road is winding, the drivers are insane, and the wine is older than your religion.

Where the Grapes Remember the Stone Age

Archaeologists in their dusty little trenches will tell you this is the “cradle of wine.” Clay fragments with tartaric acid residue, grape pips from 6,000 BCE—evidence of fermentation long before France was anything but a damp forest full of confused Celts.

Georgians don’t need the lab reports. They’ll tell you they’ve always made wine. It’s not a trend, it’s not a “heritage brand,” it’s just what you do if you’re born between these mountains and this sea. You plant vines, you bury clay vessels in the ground, you argue with your neighbors about which grape is king, and you drink like the Mongols are coming back tomorrow.

Wine is not a side dish here. It’s the bloodstream of the culture. Every family, from the taxi driver in Tbilisi to the retired engineer in Telavi, either has a vineyard, had a vineyard, or is actively complaining that they should have a vineyard.

If you come to Georgia for wine, understand: you’re not a customer. You’re a target—a willing victim of a nationwide plot to fill you with fermented grape juice and homemade chacha until you start to understand the language of the mountains.

The Qvevri: Clay Coffins for Grapes and Reason

Forget your stainless steel tanks and French oak barrels with the price tags of German sedans. Georgia’s wine soul lives underground in massive clay vessels called qvevri—egg-shaped, beeswax-lined amphorae buried up to their necks in the earth like ancient terracotta submarines.

This is not some hipster innovation. This is the original operating system of winemaking. Grapes—skins, stems, seeds, sometimes even the whole damn cluster—go into the qvevri, get sealed up, and are left to ferment with the calm, patient indifference of geology itself. Months pass. The earth regulates the temperature. Gravity does its work. The chaos of life and death in the grape skins resolves into something coherent, dangerous, and very much alive.

UNESCO, in a rare moment of sanity, recognized this as intangible cultural heritage. But it’s more than that. It’s a philosophy:

• Wine as a living thing, not a polished product.
• Time and earth as collaborators, not obstacles.
• Imperfection as character, not a flaw to be engineered out.

You stand in a marani (traditional wine cellar), the air cool and damp, and look down at these wide-mouthed clay wells in the stone floor. Somewhere below your feet, millions of microscopic yeasts are throwing an invisible riot, turning sugar into alcohol and chaos into something you can pour into a glass and blame for your decisions.

In Georgia, you don’t just taste qvevri wine. You crawl into the same timeline as people who were drinking out of similar vessels when the pyramids were still a wild idea.

Kakheti: The Eastern Front of Your Liver

If Georgia is the cradle of wine, Kakheti is the loaded bottle someone left in that cradle and forgot to take away. This is the country’s main wine region, an endless patchwork of vineyards stretching toward the snowy fangs of the Caucasus, with villages that sound like incantations: Telavi, Sighnaghi, Kvareli, Tsinandali.

Telavi: Where the Road Bends and the Glass Refills

Telavi is your likely base camp—a sleepy little town that pretends to be modest while surrounded by some of the most important vineyards in the country. From here, you can spin in any direction and hit:

• Family maranis where grandfathers in wool hats pull wine out of the ground with a plastic tube and a look that says, “You’re not leaving sober.”
• Boutique wineries that have discovered the unholy power of Instagram but still stomp grapes like their ancestors.
• Soviet-era giants that once supplied half the USSR with their only real reason to live.

You’ll taste Saperavi, that ink-dark red that laughs at your attempts to rinse it from your teeth. You’ll meet Rkatsiteli, the white grape that’s been around since people thought bronze was cutting-edge tech. And you’ll start to understand that “amber wine” here isn’t a trend—it’s a way of life.

Sighnaghi: Tuscan Fantasy with Caucasian Teeth

Perched on a hillside with a view of the Alazani Valley that looks like a postcard someone slipped you during a nervous breakdown, Sighnaghi is the prettified face of Kakheti: cobbled streets, pastel facades, and enough guesthouses to absorb a small invading army.

This is where you come when you want to pretend you’re in some alternate-universe Tuscany where the food is better, the wine is cheaper, and the locals are far more determined to get you drunk. It’s also where you start to understand supra, the Georgian feast, which is less a meal and more a controlled demolition of your self-control.

The Supra: Ritual, Madness, and the Art of Staying Upright

To do wine tourism in Georgia without surviving at least one supra is like going to Pamplona and skipping the bulls. This is the central ceremony of Georgian life: the long table, the impossible avalanche of dishes, the toasts that stretch into the night like some kind of verbal marathon.

At the head of the table sits the tamada—the toastmaster, priest, and emotional stuntman of the evening. His job is nothing less than to drag every soul at that table through the full spectrum of human existence using nothing but wine and words.

The toasts come in waves:

1. To God (whether you believe or not is irrelevant; the wine does).
2. To peace.
3. To parents.
4. To the dead.
5. To love—first the pure kind, then the catastrophic kind.
6. To children, to friends, to the homeland, to the people who couldn’t be there, to the ones who left and never came back.

Each toast is not a quick clink and sip. It’s a speech, a story, a confession—sometimes a therapy session with two liters of Saperavi riding shotgun. You drink at the end of each one, and the wine keeps coming: pitchers, carafes, old plastic bottles refilled from the qvevri out back.

By the third hour, you’re not just a tourist. You’re implicated. You’ve been woven into their narrative. Your name has been spoken in toasts about friendship and fate. You are now, in some small, dangerous way, part of this place.

Tbilisi: Urban Gonzo with a Wine Problem

Eventually, you stagger back to Tbilisi, the capital, which is what happens when you let a medieval town grow up under the psychological pressure of empires, invasions, and cheap electricity.

Here, wine has gone metropolitan:

• Wine bars in crumbling 19th-century buildings, pouring natural qvevri wines by the glass to a mix of tattooed locals, baffled tourists, and expats who came for a weekend and forgot to leave.
• Hip cellars where the winemaker wears a black turtleneck and talks about skin contact and terroir while his grandmother in the village still makes the same wine barefoot in a clay pit.
• Basement spots where you knock on a metal door, descend into a brick tunnel, and find yourself at a table covered in khachapuri, khinkali, and enough wine to drown a mid-sized horse.

You’ll hear words like “natural,” “low-intervention,” and “orange wine” thrown around with religious fervor. The irony is that Georgians have been making “natural wine” since before anyone had to differentiate it from the industrial kind. For them it’s not a movement; it’s Tuesday.

Beyond Kakheti: Side Quests for the Deranged and Curious

If you’ve still got functioning brain cells and a stomach lining, the rest of Georgia opens up like a map someone spilled wine on.

• Imereti (West): Fresher, lighter wines; more white grapes; a different qvevri style (often partially buried). The food gets greener—more herbs, more walnuts, more ways to convince yourself that this is all “healthy.”
• Racha-Lechkhumi: High-altitude madness. Semi-sweet reds like Khvanchkara that Stalin reportedly loved, which is a complicated endorsement but historically relevant. The landscapes are so beautiful it feels like the mountains are mocking your hangover.
• Kartli (Central): The quiet workhorse. Ancient vineyards hiding in plain sight, supplying Tbilisi with both everyday table wine and some of the most interesting experimental stuff in the country.

Every region has its grapes, its microclimates, its obsessions. You could spend a month here and barely scratch the surface. You could spend a year and still be surprised by a backyard marani in some anonymous village where a guy in rubber boots pours you the best wine you’ll drink all week out of a reused Coca-Cola bottle.

How to Survive This Beautiful Ambush

You’re not coming here for a spa cleanse. But you can tilt the odds in your favor.

• Eat like you mean it. Khachapuri (obscene cheese bread), lobio (beans in clay pots), mtsvadi (grilled meat), pkhali (vegetable and walnut spreads)—this is not garnish. It’s structural reinforcement.
• Hydrate or die. For every glass of wine, get some water in you. Georgians will respect your stamina more than your collapse.
• Pace yourself at the supra. You are allowed to sip. You are not required to match the 70-year-old uncle across the table who has been training for this since Brezhnev.

The Real Vintage You Came For

You land in Georgia thinking you’re here to taste wine. You leave realizing wine was just the bait. The real thing they’ve been pouring into you is something older and stranger:

• A civilization that outlasted empires by burying its soul in clay and digging it up when the coast was clear.
• A philosophy that says: share what you have, toast what you’ve lost, and never drink alone if you can help it.
• A living argument that hospitality is not a performance but a reflex, and that a stranger at your table is an opportunity, not a threat.

The bottles you haul home will eventually empty. The labels will fade, the corks will dry out, and you’ll forget which vintage came from which village. What stays is the memory of that night in a stone cellar in Kakheti, or that cramped apartment in Tbilisi, when someone raised a glass and included you in a toast about friendship, or fate, or the bizarre fact that people from such distant worlds could end up at the same table.

Wine tourism in Georgia is not about collecting experiences like stamps. It’s about letting a place this old and this stubborn get under your skin, stain your teeth, scramble your calendar, and rearrange your sense of what travel—and drinking—are actually for.

You don’t come here to stay in control. You come here to surrender, one clay-cupped, amber-glowing glass at a time.