By Prof. Giorgi Pkhakadze, MD, MPH, PhD · 15/09/2026
Alexander Chavchavadze was born in 1786 in Saint Petersburg, godson of Catherine the Great, and grew up to be a general in the Russian army, a poet who translated Racine into Georgian, and the host of the most brilliant house in the Caucasus. That house is at Tsinandali, ten kilometres from Telavi, and it is still there — a white villa with a wide verandah in a park of cedars, magnolias and a maze, with the mountains behind.
The house
Chavchavadze rebuilt the family estate in the 1830s in the European style he had learned in Russia and France: a library, a music room with the first piano in Kakheti, French windows onto the garden, guest rooms for the writers and officers who came for weeks at a time. Pushkin had been a guest of the family in Tbilisi; Lermontov came to Tsinandali; Alexandre Dumas dined here in 1858 and wrote about the wine. Griboyedov, the Russian playwright and ambassador to Persia, married Chavchavadze’s daughter Nino in the house chapel in 1828 — she was sixteen; he was killed in Tehran six months later, and her grave in Tbilisi is one of the city’s saddest places.
In 1854 the estate was raided by the forces of Imam Shamil from Dagestan, who carried off the women and children of the household to the mountains and held them for eight months. The ransom broke the family. The Russian crown took the estate in 1886, and it is the imperial vineyard and cellar that you visit today, alongside the family house.
The wine
Chavchavadze’s real revolution was in the cellar. He was the first in Georgia to bottle wine in the European manner — glass, cork, label, vintage — rather than keep it in the qvevri and sell it by the jug. Tsinandali, the dry white blend of Rkatsiteli and Mtsvane that carries the estate’s name, was born here, and the cellar under the house holds a collection of some 16,000 bottles, the oldest from 1839 — a Saperavi still, allegedly, drinkable. Georgian wine’s two traditions, the buried clay and the bottled European, meet in this one building.
Visiting
The house is a museum, furnished as it was, with the library, the family portraits and Nino’s wedding dress. The gardens are the finest in Kakheti and take an hour on their own. The tasting room by the cellar pours the estate’s wines; the modern Tsinandali Estate hotel next door has restored the old winery as a concert hall, and the Tsinandali Festival in September brings orchestras from Europe to a stage in the vineyards.
See it with GTour
Tsinandali is the afternoon of the Telavi & Kakheti day, the first evening of the Grand Wine & Heritage tour, and the last stop of the Rtveli harvest tour.
This story in Georgian — ქართულად: shenidasveneba.ge
ქართულად: წინანდლის ბიბლიოთეკა — თავადი, რომელმაც ევროპა კახეთში ჩამოიტანა
