Garikula: a quiet wine and sculpture stop in Shida Kartli

By David Kiknadze, Transport & Openings Reporter · 30/10/2026

Garikula will not appear on many must-see lists, and that is rather the point. This small village in Kaspi Municipality, set in the Tedzami river valley about 70 km from Tbilisi, works best as a waypoint rather than a destination in itself — a place to break the journey west toward Gori, Uplistsikhe or Borjomi with something more textured than a highway service stop. In October, with harvest underway in the surrounding vineyards, it earns that stop more than most months of the year.

The valley around Garikula belongs to Shida Kartli’s wine country, where family growers tend terraced plots of Tavkveri alongside Rkatsiteli and Saperavi, often fermenting in qvevri in the traditional manner. October puts this activity on open display: presses working, cellars busy, and small producers such as Tedzami Wines, Merebashvili Estate, and Irma and Kato’s Vineyards and Marani generally willing to receive visitors by prior arrangement for a tasting paired with home-style cooking.

A forest of forgotten sculpture

Garikula’s second claim on a traveller’s time is less obvious and more unusual. In the forest near the village, terracotta and stone pieces remain scattered from a Soviet-era open-air ceramics and sculpture workshop that once drew Georgian and foreign artists for seasonal symposiums. Nothing here is curated or labelled — the works stand weathered among the trees much as they were left — and a local guide is genuinely useful for finding the clearings. It is a minor footnote in Georgian art history, but a tangible and slightly eerie one, and autumn light through thinning forest canopy suits it well.

For those with a car and a free afternoon, the low Kvernaki ridge above the valley gives unmarked but easy walking with wide views over Shida Kartli’s fields and vineyards toward the Kura valley; a driver who knows the farm tracks helps here, since there is no formal trail. Kaspi, the district centre a short drive away, serves as the practical supply point for the valley and offers a glimpse of ordinary provincial Georgia alongside older churches and a Sunday market.

Garikula suits independent travellers with their own transport or a hired driver, rather than those relying on public transport, since there is no direct marshrutka service into the village itself. It also suits anyone building a slower, wine-focused route through Shida Kartli rather than a single day trip from Tbilisi — combine it with Mtskheta on the way out and Gori or Uplistsikhe on the way onward, with a night at the nearby Chateau Mephis Kalaki if time allows.

Read more on gtour.ge: Garikula

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Source: UNESCO World Heritage List (whc.unesco.org)