Rtveli Grape Harvest

Your guide collects you from the airport and introduces Old Tbilisi: Metekhi Church on its rock above the river, the cable car that swings up to Narikala Fortress, and the sulphur bathhouses of Abanotubani. In a Sololaki wine bar you sample qvevri wine from the previous vintage, made by the families you will stay with in Kakheti, and hear how this season's harvest is shaping up. Dinner is at a restaurant cooking Kakhetian food, such as chakapuli, spring lamb stewed with tarragon, and mtsvadi cooked over burning vine cuttings.

On the way to Kakheti, stop at the Telavi market, which in harvest season overflows with grapes, plastic crates and brand-new qvevri. Then carry on to your hosts' home in a wine village close to Telavi and move into their guesthouse. In the afternoon the winemaker takes you round the vineyard to explain the grape varieties, how ripeness is judged by tasting, and when picking will begin. Lend a hand cleaning the qvevri and coating them with lime so they are ready for the new wine, then join the family for dinner in their garden.

You are in the vineyard early with the family and their neighbours, snipping bunches of Rkatsiteli or Saperavi into crates. By midday the grapes are tipped into the satsnakheli, a long wooden trough, and trodden or pressed; the juice goes into the qvevri to ferment together with the skins and some of the stems. Lunch is eaten among the vines. In the afternoon, part of the fresh must is cooked with flour into a thick paste called tatara, and you dunk threaded walnuts into it again and again until they turn into churchkhela. In the evening the harvest crew sits down together for a family supra.

First check the fermenting qvevri; the juice bubbles away and needs stirring several times a day. Then drive to Alaverdi Monastery, where the monks make wine in a cellar with a history reaching back to the 11th century, and at rtveli you can watch their own harvest in progress. Afterwards visit Gremi, whose royal citadel dates from the 16th century, and Nekresi Monastery on its hillside. After lunch comes the Khareba wine tunnel in Kvareli, excavated in the 1950s, for a taste of semi-sweet Kindzmarauli. You return to your host family for dinner.

After saying goodbye to your hosts, drive to Tsinandali, where in the 19th century Alexander Chavchavadze bottled some of the first European-style wines made in Georgia. See the house museum, the gardens and the old cellar, then follow the Alazani Valley to Sighnaghi for a walk on its 18th-century walls. If a neighbour has a still going, you can watch chacha being distilled from the grape pomace. The evening is the harvest supra itself, led by a tamada, full of toasts to the new wine and carried along by polyphonic singers.

Early in the morning, walk the walls of Sighnaghi while the mist lifts off the Alazani Valley. At Bodbe Monastery, where St Nino is buried, you can follow the steep path down to her spring if you want some exercise. The drive back to Tbilisi includes a pause at a roadside stall to buy churchkhela and a bag of Kakhetian walnuts. Your driver then takes you to the airport or your hotel. In spring, when the new wine is opened, expect a photo from your hosts of the qvevri you helped to fill.