Tbilisi

Eastern Georgia

Wine and the Caucasus

Ski

About Tbilisi

Tbilisi sprawls along a river gorge beneath a fortress and a giant aluminium statue, the carved wooden balconies of its old town half-collapsing with character.

Sulphur bathhouses steam under brick domes, crumbling courtyards hide wine bars, and the Caucasus mountains beckon just up the road. Georgia has made wine for eight thousand years in buried clay vessels, and hospitality here is a serious, near-sacred business.

The city is shabby, soulful and changing fast, caught between a Soviet hangover and a creative surge.

Eat soup dumplings called khinkali and cheese-filled khachapuri, and let a stranger pour you the house wine.

Get to Tbilisi

Round trip from Prague, any dates in November 2026.

Day trips from Tbilisi

Half day
Mtskheta & Jvari
~30 min
Georgia's ancient capital and spiritual centre at the meeting of two rivers, watched from a hilltop by the 6th-century Jvari church — the postcard image of Georgian Christianity.
Day trip
Sighnaghi & Kakheti
~2 h
Georgia's wine country: the walled hill town of Sighnaghi above the Alazani valley, the Bodbe convent, and family wineries pouring amber wine from buried qvevri clay vessels.
Long day
Davit Gareja
~2.5 h
A cave monastery complex carved into desert hills on the Azerbaijani border, surrounded by striped, Mars-like badlands utterly unlike the rest of the country.
Long day
Kazbegi & Gergeti
~3 h
The Gergeti Trinity church alone on a ridge beneath 5,054-metre Mount Kazbek, reached along the Georgian Military Highway past the Ananuri fortress and the Gudauri pass. The classic Caucasus day trip.