Eight days in Georgia: Tbilisi, Kazbegi and the wine region nobody plans properly

What to take away

• Marshrutkas leave when full, not at a time. Turn up early and ask three people.
• Gergeti Trinity is a 90-minute walk up. The 4x4 removes the best part of the day.
• Kakheti during the October harvest is a different, better country.
• Tbilisi is genuinely cheap. Dinner with wine for four ran us about 120 lari.
• The Georgian Military Highway is spectacular and not a road to learn to drive on.

Tbilisi is three cities on top of each other

The old town below Narikala fortress is Persian and Ottoman in its bones: sulphur bath domes poking out of the ground in Abanotubani, wooden balconies, and lanes too narrow for cars. Twenty minutes north it becomes a nineteenth-century imperial city of wide avenues. Twenty minutes further it is Soviet concrete, and inside one of those buildings is a bar that would not be out of place in Berlin.

The sulphur baths are the thing to do first, not last. A private room with a bath and a scrub costs somewhere between 60 and 150 lari depending on how ornate the establishment is, takes an hour, and resets you after a flight. Book a room rather than using the public pool if you are a group.

The other reliable Tbilisi day is Fabrika: a Soviet sewing factory turned into a hostel and courtyard on the left bank, surrounded by bars and studios. It is the centre of gravity for anyone under thirty-five in the city, and the courtyard is free to sit in.

• Abanotubani sulphur baths, private room, about an hour.
• Narikala by the cable car up and on foot down through the botanical garden.
• Dry Bridge market for Soviet cameras, medals and genuine junk.
• Fabrika in the evening, and the wine bars on the streets around it.

How marshrutkas actually work

A marshrutka is a minibus that leaves from a yard when it is full. There is no timetable in the sense you are used to, there is a first departure and a last departure and a driver who decides. Didube station in Tbilisi is where most of them go from, and it is a car park with signs in Georgian and a lot of shouting.

The system works. Ask, get pointed, ask again, get pointed better, pay the driver, wait. Tbilisi to Stepantsminda is around three hours and cost us 15 lari a head. Tbilisi to Telavi in Kakheti is about two. If a bus is nearly full when you arrive, take it, because the next one might be an hour or might be three.

The alternative is hiring a driver, which for four people is not expensive and buys you stops. We did this for one day in Kakheti, paid around 250 lari for the whole car for a full day, and visited four wineries that no bus goes near. For the Georgian Military Highway we took the marshrutka up and a shared taxi back.

Kazbegi: walk up, do not drive up

Gergeti Trinity Church sits at 2,170 metres on a ridge above Stepantsminda with Mount Kazbek behind it, and it is the image that sells Georgia. There is a road to it and a queue of Delica vans at the bottom of the village charging to drive you up.

Do not take one unless you have to. The walk is about ninety minutes up through the village, into woods, then onto open grass, and the church appears in stages in a way it never does when you arrive by van. Coming down takes an hour. Bring water; there is nothing on the path.

The other thing to know about Stepantsminda is the weather. At 1,700 metres in the Caucasus, cloud sits in the valley for days at a time and Kazbek itself is visible perhaps half the days in October. Two nights gives you two chances at it. One night gives you one, and a lot of people have travelled three hours each way to look at fog.

Kakheti in harvest, which is the only way to do it

Georgia has been making wine in clay qvevri buried in the ground for eight thousand years, which is not a marketing line, it is an archaeological finding. The method survives in Kakheti in family cellars, and in September and October those cellars are working.

Rtveli, the harvest, turns the whole region into an ongoing event. Wineries are busy, families are picking, and the traditional response to a visitor arriving during rtveli is to hand them a glass and a job. We turned up at a small marani outside Sighnaghi expecting a tasting and ended up stamping grapes for an hour.

The practicalities: a tasting at a family winery runs 20 to 50 lari a head, usually with food, and often turns into lunch. The big commercial estates charge more and give you less. Sighnaghi is the town to base in, a small walled hill town with a view over the Alazani valley to the Caucasus, and it is twenty minutes from Bodbe monastery, which is worth an hour.

What eight days in Georgia costs

Georgia is the cheapest country in this series by a distance and the food is among the best. Dinner for four with a jug of wine in Tbilisi ran 100 to 140 lari total. A khachapuri, which is a bread boat of cheese, butter and egg, is 12 to 20 lari and feeds one and a half people. Marshrutka fares are single digits to low teens.

The costs that are not cheap: a hired driver for a full day, a private bath room in the old town, and any restaurant with an English-first menu on Rustaveli. None of these are expensive by European standards.

Cards work in Tbilisi and in most of Sighnaghi. In the mountains and at village wineries it is cash, in lari, and the machine in Stepantsminda has been known to be empty. Total for the eight days, excluding flights, was about 430 euros a head including accommodation, transport, every meal and a great deal of wine.

Questions travellers ask

Before you book

Keep reading

• Ten days in Albania: Tirana, Berat and a coast that is not only Ksamil
• A long weekend in Marrakech, and the medina navigation problem
• The best travel app for young people is the one your friends will open