Wine & Supra

After you are collected at the airport, take some time to rest. Late in the afternoon your guide walks you through the old city, by the bathhouses of Abanotubani and uphill into Sololaki, whose old courtyards hide many of the capital's natural wine bars. Here you work through a line-up of qvevri wines from small makers, starting with amber Rkatsiteli and moving on to rarer grapes such as Chinuri and Tavkveri. For dinner you move on to a restaurant known for regional cooking, where you hear your first Georgian toasts.

The morning begins at the Dezerter Bazaar, the central food market, among heaps of fresh herbs and spices, rounds of sulguni, jars of adjika and strings of churchkhela. In an Old Town bakery close to Sioni Cathedral, watch the baker slap dough onto the inside wall of a tone oven. At midday a home cook takes you through a class: pleating khinkali, filling and folding Imeretian khachapuri, and making pkhali from spinach and beetroot bound with walnut paste. Then you sit down and eat the lot. End the day with a drink in the courtyard of Fabrika, which was a Soviet sewing factory and is now full of bars.

Cross the mountains into Kakheti. At Ikalto Monastery the ruins of a 12th-century academy stand next to a stone wine press and qvevri still set in the ground. Telavi comes next, with a walk around its market and a visit to Batonis Tsikhe, King Erekle II's palace. The afternoon is spent at the Tsinandali estate, where Alexander Chavchavadze's 19th-century cellar became one of the first in Georgia to bottle wine the European way, and you taste the estate's wines on the spot. Dinner is at a family winery outside Telavi.

Begin at Alaverdi Monastery. Its 11th-century cathedral soars above the vineyards, and the monks still make qvevri wine in a cellar whose origins go back to the same century. Next is Gremi, the royal citadel raised in the 16th century, followed by the climb to Nekresi Monastery for a wide view of the valley. Then, after lunch, you walk into the Khareba tunnel at Kvareli, which was bored into the mountain in the 1950s and stays naturally cool through the year, for a glass of Kindzmarauli, the semi-sweet red made from local Saperavi. In the evening a local family teaches you to make churchkhela.

Today belongs to a winemaking household in a village on the slopes below Sighnaghi. You lend a hand with the shoti, pressing the dough onto the hot clay walls of the tone, help cook mtsvadi over a fire of vine prunings, and drink wine ladled out of the qvevri, perhaps a Kisi or Mtsvane left on its skins. After checking in at Sighnaghi in the afternoon, you go down to Bodbe Monastery, where St Nino was buried in the 4th century. Evening brings the full supra. Your tamada steers the toasts, and between them a few local singers perform polyphonic songs, a tradition UNESCO also lists as intangible heritage.

Leaving Kakheti behind, you cross to Mtskheta, the ancient capital, to see Svetitskhoveli Cathedral and then Jvari Monastery on its height over the two rivers. Lunch is at a roadside place just outside town whose speciality is lobio, red beans slow-cooked in clay and eaten with mchadi, a flat cornbread. Back in Tbilisi in the afternoon, you have free time for a sulphur bath or for buying wine to take home. At the farewell dinner, regional dishes arrive with bottles from small producers chosen to match them.

With a later flight, you can spend the morning browsing the Dry Bridge Market, where sellers lay out Soviet-era badges, old drinking horns, silverware and paintings, or stock up on a final bag of spices and some churchkhela. If you want bottles to take home, your guide can help you choose and pack them for the plane; Georgian customs let you carry a reasonable amount for your own use. Finally your driver takes you to Tbilisi airport.