A Visit to Georgia - Part 1

Many years ago I discovered the beautiful and unique Georgian script. Since then I’ve been intrigued by this small Caucasian country. More recently, pre-Covid, we talked to some friends about going there together. Thanks to Covid that never happened, but we did buy the Lonely Planet guide-book which got me a lot more interested. It’s one of the oldest surviving civilizations in the world, despite the best efforts of all of its neighbours to invade and destroy it, packed with ancient monasteries and churches going back to the 4th century AD. It is also the birthplace of winemaking, with its own grape varieties and a unique technique that makes especially well-flavoured wines.

We found a company that organizes wine-oriented tours there, and at short notice booked a one-week trip. We were very lucky to be the only two people on the tour - we could have been in a larger group, which would have made the most interesting parts of our trip impossible. Air France flies to Tbilisi (the capital) a few times a week, so we organised things around that. We had little idea what to expect. I used the intervening time to learn the Georgian alphabet, since I hate going somewhere and being unable to read anything at all.

This blog is in two parts. The story of the second part of our trip is here.

Arrival

Our flight managed to leave over two hours late from Paris, so with the two-hour time difference we arrived at about 1.30 am. We were met by our guide, Lali, and our driver for the week, Misho. The streets were still quite full as we drove into town. Our hotel could have been anywhere in the world, with a decent-sized room and all the usual amenities. So far, so good.

Gold jewelry at the National Museum

The next morning, a bit sleepy, we were taken on a walking tour of the city. Our first stop was the National Museum. In the time available all we saw was the collection of ancient gold jewelry. Georgians were amazing goldsmiths when Europe was still in the stone age, using techniques which cannot be reproduced even today.

We saw the first of many thousand-plus year old churches. It wasn’t as hot as we’d feared, but it was still very hot and tiring in the sun. The church interiors make a very welcome relief. Our guide had an extraordinary depth of knowledge about the history of the churches and monasteries, which impressed us throughout the trip.

Tbilisi is built in a narrow valley, surmounted by hills either side. We took a modern cable car to the top, with spectacular views, though the monastery which is the real target of the cable car is closed for restoration. After that we had our first meal in Georgia. When we lived in the US, there was a Georgian restaurant nearby which left us fairly underwhelmed. We hoped that the real thing would be better. One of the universal staples of Georgian food is khinkali, a large dumpling generally filled with minced meat, and liquid broth. Done properly, as we discovered later, they are delicious. But at the tourist-trap by the river that we visited this time, they were a disappointment, dry and tasteless.

Tbilisi's baths with their characteristic
domed roofs

The afternoon took us on the classic tourist trail through Tbilisi. We started at the hot sulphur baths, which were discovered by king Vakhtang Gorgasali around 500 AD. According to legend, he decided on the spot to move the capital there, thus creating Tbilisi. From there we walked along a café-lined street to the Sioni Cathedral, another ancient church. By then we were exhausted from the heat, and delighted when Lali steered us into a beautifully decorated café and ordered a jug of home-made lemonade, augmented with finely chopped mint that gave it an extra delicious tang as we savoured it in the air-conditioned cool.

At the end of the tourist street, where we waited for our driver to collect us, was a very unusual car - a 1959 Edsel, in perfect condition. The name has become a synonym for huge commercial failure - very few were sold even in the US, and to find one in Georgia is just so improbable. I discovered later that Georgia is a busy marketplace for cars making their way from Europe and the US to central Asia - our driver’s car was a US-model Ford Fusion, its speedometer calibrated in MPH. We also saw a 1950s Ford Falcon and a 1960s Cadillac, both being used as wedding cars.

A 1959 Edsel parked in central Tbilisi

After a rest at the hotel, we went for our first dinner in Georgia. The meal was bracketed by a tomato-and-cucumber salad, and a huge platter of fresh fruit. Nearly every meal had some variant of the other Georgian staple, khachapuri. This is a bit like an enclosed pizza, two very thin layers of dough filled with cheesy stuff of some kind. The best are delicious, and even mediocre ones are pleasantly filling. The rest of the meal set a pattern which was repeated, with minor variations, throughout the trip - a vegetable stew, tasty little walnut-based dumpling things called pkhali, often some barbecued meat. And always the brackets of salad and fruit.

We had our first Georgian wine of the trip, a qvevri saperavi - more on the wines later. This one was the least good of all we had, but luckily they improved after that.

Travels, and Wine

Our first wine-tasting, in Sighnaghi

Making Kakheti-style bread

The following morning we left for Kakheti, the eastern part of the country where most of the wine is made. After a long drive we arrived in the hilltop town of Sighnaghi (if you speak standard French, it’s pronounced as if it was written Sirnari, though most foreigners say Signagi), and to our first wine tasting. This was a private house, adapted as a small tourist restaurant. We went down several floors into the tasting room, where our hostess explained everything. She was about 30 and spoke reverently about her grandfather and his traditions, from whom she was evidently taking over as winemaker. Later we saw her making traditional Kakheti bread. It looks a bit like a squashed baguette, and it is absolutely delicious. It’s made from unleavened (no yeast) dough, which is wrapped around the inside of a cylinder about 80 cm across. Then wood is placed in the middle and ignited. When the wood has burned out, the bread is cooked to perfection, crunchy on the outside and soft and chewy in the middle.

We were constantly surprised on our trip by how good people’s English was. Our tour was in French and our guide spoke fluent, almost unaccented French. But at Sighnaghi, and elsewhere, it was simpler to let the local person talk to us in English. Our host there was completely fluent, even though she had only visited the US a few times.

Traditional Georgian winemaking uses a qvevri. This is a large clay vessel, which can hold anything from a few hundred litres up to 2000, or even more. They are roughly the shape of a rugby ball, pointed at the bottom and open at the top, and buried in the ground so all you can see is the hole at the top. The grapes are crushed, traditionally by foot but nowadays by machine, and then everything is poured into the qvevri - juice, skins, pulp, and even sometimes the stems - and left to ferment for a few days. Being buried in the ground keeps the temperature under control, an important concern since the fermentation produces a lot of heat.

Traditionally, once the fermentation has stopped, the qvevri would be sealed and the wine stored there until required. The wines were for home consumption, so not kept for very long. Nowadays the liquid is removed and placed into another qvevri, which is topped up and sealed. The wine-soaked solids at the bottom of the qvevri, called cha-cha, are retrieved and distilled to make a strong alcohol also called cha-cha.

Qvevri, before they are buried

Especially for white wines, this is very different from Western methods, where the juice is separated from the skins and pulp almost immediately. It makes the characteristic “amber wine”, strongly coloured and with a taste and mouth-feel intermediate between red and white wine - though nothing like a rosé. On our last night we drank a qvevri white wine with beef and lamb, which it accompanied perfectly.

Georgia has its own grape varieties, which are unknown in Europe and the US. The most common (by far) red grape is Saperavi, which can make a delicious, full-bodied, well-rounded red. My description is that it is what Merlot really wants to be. The most common white grape is Rkatskeli (the natives almost omit the initial R, and you can too). There are 102 others, carefully preserved at the Alaverdi monastery, of which maybe 30 are commonly used to some extent. There have also been attempts at growing classic western grapes, in particular Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay. This is probably more about name recognition in western markets than it is about improving the wines - which they don’t need.

For a long time the principal market for Georgian wine was (the rest of) the Soviet Union, which wanted sweet-ish red wines, and most of all lots and lots of it. Since its collapse, Georgia has turned to other markets and to improved quality. Even so, Russia still takes about 50% of wine exports, with the rest going mainly to Eastern Europe and to a fast-growing market in China.

Sighnaghi, with one of its signature towers

After the tasting we strolled around the town, built mainly in the 18th century so practically brand new by Georgian standards. The old town is surrounded by a wall, with over 30 watchtowers along its length. We bought a big bag of delicious fresh figs from a black-clad old lady sitting beside the road, for next to nothing - 5 Georgian Lari (GEL or ₾), or about €1.50. The town sits and the end of a ridge between the two principal valleys of eastern Georgia, with spectacular views over both of them.

Monasteries and Invaders

Georgia converted to Christianity in the 4th century AD. There followed a spate of building monasteries and associated churches. Lali, our guide, has an encyclopedic knowledge not just of individual sites but of the history of the architecture, and how the construction of the churches evolved over time. This was fascinating to listen to, though sometimes a bit overwhelming.

To understand Georgia (even a little), you have to start with geography. It’s a small and very rich country, agriculturally, surrounded on all sides by other countries that would like to own or control it: Russia to north, Turkey to the west, Iran/Persia to the south, and the Mongol hordes to the East. Over the centuries they, and others, have all invaded, with the usual genocide, pillaging and general destruction. The Russians and later the Soviet Union were the most recent, starting in 1806, but by no means the worst. Amazingly, the Georgians managed to retain their language and culture through all of this.

Despite this repeated destruction, and the passing of a couple of millennia, many of the monasteries and churches survive. Our first was at Bodbe, close to Sighnaghi. It’s still an active convent, in addition to the church. It’s one of “the” go-to places, so it was very crowded, with a lot of Russians. Georgia is one of the few countries they can still visit readily, so they show up everywhere. Which is ironic, because this church, like all of the others we saw, had been vandalized under the Soviet Union. All of the frescoes, which had survived for centuries, were smothered in whitewash or concrete. It’s practically impossible to remove without destroying the fresco underneath, so the churches just have a few patches here and there which have either been restored, or which the Russians missed. It’s incomprehensible really - my theory is that the Russians are so inherently miserable that they deliberately wreck anything that might give anyone any kind of pleasure.

Bodbe is famous as the resting place of St Nino, the person behind the country’s transformation to Christianity. It seems incredible that one woman can have had so much influence.

Telavi's famous 900-year-old plane tree

Telavi fort, and statue of King Erekle II

The Monastery at Alaverdi

Qvevri installed in the ground at Chubini

From there we went to our night-stop at Telavi, the major town in the Kakheti region. It’s a sleepy little town, which we explored completely on foot. Its main attraction is a 900-year old plane tree, which is absolutely enormous as you could imagine. It’s surprising that the Russians didn’t chop it down, I guess they couldn’t get their chainsaws to work for long enough. Dinner followed the familiar pattern, outdoors with great views over the countryside at a very pleasant restaurant. It was right next to our hotel, which surprisingly was a Holiday Inn, just like any other Holiday Inn anywhere in the world.

Our morning started with the Alaverdi Monastery. It was built in the 6th century, though the current buildings are from the 11th century. It is considered one of the four great monasteries of the Georgian Orthodox church. Unfortunately it had been hit by a very localized tornado just a few weeks before, badly damaging all the roofs, so it was covered in scaffolding and plastic sheeting.

The monastery is still home to the bishop - the modern air-conditioner attached to the 11th century walls is a dead give-away. It is still active as a monastery as well, though there are only three resident monks.

Alaverdi has a long tradition of winemaking and is the most famous winery in the country. At the monastery is a tiny vineyard with every one of Georgia’s 104 grape varieties. We’d read about the winery in a book about the history of wine and winemaking, which dedicated a whole chapter to a visit there. Normally it is not accessible, but we asked Lali if there was any chance of a tour. She made a few phone calls and to our amazement, we were all set for a visit the next morning - more on that later.

Our next stop was at a winery that is also a museum. It was the first time we saw how qvevri are actually used, with only their top visible. While the fermentation is in progress, they are left open, and pushed down every three hours or so. The carbon dioxide from the fermentation protects the wine from the air. Once the fermentation is complete, the liquid wine is usually moved to another qvevri, which is then sealed completely using wax, and covered in gravel until they decide to remove it for bottling.

Next came the fortress at Gremi. This used to be a major town, the capital of the Kakheti region. But the Persians had wanted to take control of Kakheti for a long time, and finally in 1615 Shah Abbas succeeded. The town was completely razed, only the hilltop fortress remaining together with a modern museum showing the history of the region. He also forced everyone to convert from Christianity to Islam, except the Queen, Ketevan. She was tortured horribly to death, but never renounced her religion.

The next winery was very different. Called Chubini, it was all the work of one young couple, mostly with their own bare hands. They started with a maize field, a few years ago, and built themselves a tiny house in one corner. They planted grapes, a mixture of mainly saperavi and rkatskeli, and built a very impressive winery, with a dozen or so qvevri at one end and a tasting room at the other. To make some extra cash, they built half a dozen holiday chalets. It was a very personal experience, learning about their experience and their wine from the young woman of the couple - who incidentally spoke near-perfect English.

Dinner that night at first site appeared to be at an abandoned house, but it turned out to be an excellent restaurant with a very pleasant garden. They served the best khachapuri of our trip.

More Travels in Khaketi

The next morning saw us back at Alaverdi, but this time for a tour of the winery that Lali miraculously managed to organise for us. The monastery has been making wine for ten centuries, using the traditional qvervi method. Nowadays it belongs to the Bagadoni company, who produce a stunning total of 33 million bottles of wine per year. Alaverdi is just their very exclusive top end. The cellars were the most impressive that we visited. Apart from the qvevri where the wine is made, there were many, many barrels of French oak for developing the wine, and large storage areas full of bottled wine. There were also a couple of special barrels on display, one of them being kept for - and labelled for - Viktor Orban, the unpleasant far-right prime minister of Hungary.

Alaverdi Wines

After the winery tour we crossed the road to the tasting room. This works differently from most of them. You pay an eye-watering upfront fee - ₾300 or about €100 for two people - but for that you get two whole bottles of wine, a red saperavi and a white rkatsiteli. We weren’t quite sure what we’d do with two opened bottles, but we solved the problem for the saperavi by finishing it between the three of us before we left. It was excellent, saperavi at its best, rounded, full-bodied, smooth and generally delicious. The rkatsiteli was excellent too, amber rather than white from the qvevri method. We took it back to the hotel with us and finished it off over three evenings sitting on our minimal terrace.

If I haven’t mentioned lunch so far, it’s because we never got round to having any. Every tasting was accompanied by delicious Georgian flat bread, and the excellent, salty Georgian cheese. Walnuts were another universal feature. They grow all over the country, the trees constantly visible as we drove around. These snacks were enough for us and saved wasting time as well as calories.

Qvevri under construction

After Alaverdi we visited a qvevri “factory”. I put the word in quotes because it was just a shed behind somebody’s house, containing eight enormous qvevri under construction. They were each about 3 metres tall, and nearly finished. They are made completely by hand, starting with the base which is turned on a potters’ wheel. After that, the shell is added about 10 cm at a time, rolled out from clay and attached to what is already there. It’s amazing that such a perfect and symmetrical shape can be created in such a simple way.

Finally, when the shape is complete, it has to be fired, just like any other pottery. But it’s enormous, much too big to fit in any conventional oven. They’re moved, very carefully, to another building, made of stone. And that is the oven. They set a large fire, seal it up apart from a small opening in the roof, and leave it to burn. Firing clay requires a temperature of over 1000°C, and I really don’t know how they get this in such a large space, but they do.

The completed qvevri still have to be moved to their final site, and buried in the ground with only the top showing. The whole process is very laborious, and even more so before you could just hire a back-hoe to dig the hole. It’s not surprising that most Georgian wine these days is made in stainless steel tanks, just like anywhere else.

The Mansion at Tsinandale

Our final call of the day was something different again. The Tsinandale Estate is a European-style mansion originally built in 1812 by Chavchavadze, a Russian nobleman. After that things get complicated. In 1854 the North Caucasians burned it down and took Chavchavadze’s family hostage. He borrowed a lot of money from the Russian throne to get them back, and to rebuild the house, but he never paid it back and eventually the Tsar claimed the house, which slowly fell into dereliction.

Whatever the history, it is a spectacular house and garden which seems completely out of place in Georgia. In fact it reminded us a lot of the Villa Arnaga in Cambo-les-Bains, in the French Basque country. It is furnished with authentic antiques and full of paintings of the family. It looks as though they have just popped out for a couple of days. 

Return to Tbilisi

Our route back to Tbilisi took us over the Gombori Pass, a spectacular mountain road which crosses the mountains at 1600m. It also cuts 60km and 40 minutes off the journey, though it turned out to be in the middle of major reconstruction. From there we returned to the same hotel in Tbilisi, where we stayed for the rest of our journey.

The next day we travelled west to Mtskheta. But for that you will have to read Part 2.