Blog Archives

The walls above Tbilisi’s old town have been rebuilt by every power that held the city for 1,500 years — which is nearly all of them. The cable car takes three minutes; the story takes a little longer.

The city was founded on hot springs and named after them. Fifteen centuries later the brick domes of Abanotubani still steam. Here is what happens inside, and how to do it properly.

A small 6th-century church on a bluff above the meeting of two rivers is the most reproduced image of Georgia. Lermontov set a poem here. The reason it was built is older than the view.

Sooner or later in Georgia you will sit at a long table, a man will stand with a glass, and everyone will fall silent. Here is what is happening, in what order, and what is expected of you.

In 1835 a Georgian poet-prince came home from Saint Petersburg with French furniture, English gardeners and a plan to bottle wine. His estate at Tsinandali is where modern Georgian wine — and a good deal of modern Georgia — began.

The strings of knobbly, purple-brown sausages hanging at every Georgian market are not sausages. They are walnuts dipped in grape must — the oldest energy bar in the world, and a harvest ritual in Kakheti.

In the middle of the Kakhetian plain, with nothing around it but vineyards and the Caucasus, stands a church 50 metres high, built in the 1010s. Its monks make wine. They always have.

The prettiest town in Kakheti is wrapped in four kilometres of 18th-century wall with 23 towers and six gates. It was built by a king who had run out of other options.

Two kilometres from Sighnaghi, in a garden of cypresses above the Alazani valley, is the grave of Saint Nino — the young woman who, in the year 337, turned Georgia Christian with a cross made of vine branches.

For four weeks every autumn, Kakheti stops being a region and becomes a single, enormous, slightly disorganised family event. Here is what you would do if you joined it.

The first glass of Georgian white wine surprises everyone: it is the colour of tea and tastes of walnuts and dried fruit. Here is what happened to it, and how to drink it well.

Georgia’s dumpling has two schools — the one from the mountains where it was born, and the one the city made famous. Knowing the difference is the difference between eating khinkali and understanding it.