Georgia

The world's oldest wine country

Georgia sits between the Black Sea and the Caucasus, with 5,000-meter peaks about three hours' drive from Tbilisi. It has also been making wine for around 8,000 years, longer than anywhere else on earth. They still do it the old way, fermenting the grapes with the skins on in big clay pots called qvevri buried in the ground, which is why the white wine comes out amber. Tbilisi is a good city to spend a few days in: sulfur bathhouses, carved wooden balconies leaning out over the streets, and food that hardly anyone outside Georgia seems to know about. Khachapuri and khinkali are the ones people have heard of. There's a lot more to it than that, most of it involving walnuts.

Dinner in Georgia is the supra: a long table, a tamada, or toastmaster, who decides when everyone drinks and what to, plates arriving faster than they can be cleared, and wine poured straight from the qvevri. In between dinners we'd head for the mountains. Kazbek is 5,054 meters and sits at the top of the Georgian Military Highway, with a small 14th-century church on a ridge below it that's a two-hour walk up from the village.

Autumn is when to go. The harvest is on in Kakheti, the wine region, the summer heat has left the city, and the mountains are usually clear. The plan is Tbilisi as a base, with a few days east in the wine country and a few days north in the Caucasus. Whether that's two separate trips out or one loop, we haven't decided.