Georgia: Tbilisi, the Military Road and the cradle of wine

I almost missed the turn for the church because I was looking at the mountain. You come up the last switchback above Stepantsminda, breathless, and there it is: a small stone church alone on a green shoulder of the Caucasus, and behind it, impossibly, the white pyramid of Mount Kazbek floating in and out of the clouds. The Gergeti Trinity Church has stood on that hilltop since the fourteenth century, at around 2,170 metres. I'd come to Georgia on a hunch and a road trip — a week with a small rented car, a country sitting right on the seam between Europe and Asia, a vague plan to drive north into the mountains and then east into the vineyards. What I hadn't quite understood, until I stood in Tbilisi with a dead phone and a paper map, is that Georgia is European in a hundred ways and yet firmly outside the European Union. That single fact shaped my whole trip, and it caught me out at the worst possible moment.

Tbilisi: sulphur, wood and a city that stays up late

I started in the capital, in the old town, where the streets fold in on themselves and the houses lean over the lanes on carved wooden balconies, paint peeling, geraniums spilling over the rails. Down in the Abanotubani district the air smells faintly of sulphur: this is the bathhouse quarter, the brick domes of the sulphur baths rising half-underground, fed by the warm springs the city was supposedly founded on. I climbed up to Narikala, the old fortress on the ridge, and watched the whole city open out below — Soviet apartment blocks, golden church domes, a glass bridge, woodsmoke and warm stone. And Tbilisi stays up late: the wine bars spill onto the cobbles, and somewhere behind a courtyard door there's a club that used to be a Soviet swimming pool. I ate my first khinkali here — fat soup dumplings you grip by the topknot, bite and slurp — and my first khachapuri, a boat of bread filled with molten cheese and a raw egg. I made a mess of both. Nobody minded.

« Georgia is European in a hundred small ways, and then it hands you a bill that reminds you it is not in the EU. »

Here is where the country caught me out. I had assumed — lazily, wrongly — that my European plan would just work, the way it does when I cross from France into Italy. It does not. Georgia is European but outside the EU, so there's no roam-like-at-home here; the moment my phone latched onto a Georgian network it was billing me roaming rates, and I only noticed because a single map lookup ate through more credit than a whole café lunch. I switched it off, sat in a wine bar with the free wifi, and bought a local Georgian eSIM there and then. Within a couple of minutes I had my own data again — proper data, the kind that lets you translate a menu, find a guesthouse, and pull up the road north without flinching at the cost.

The Georgian Military Road, and the church under Kazbek

The drive out of Tbilisi is one of the great roads. The Georgian Military Road climbs north for a few hours toward the Russian border, through Mtskheta — the ancient capital, with its UNESCO-listed Svetitskhoveli cathedral, where I stood under a thousand years of stone — and then up and up, past the Jvari Pass and the strange concrete sweep of the Soviet-era Friendship monument, until the valleys narrow and the snow starts. It ends, for most travellers, at Stepantsminda (Kazbegi). And I'll be honest about the connectivity up there, because it matters more than the brochures admit: around Tbilisi and the lower road the network was genuinely good, but the higher I drove the thinner it got, and in the deep valleys below Kazbek there were long white stretches with no signal at all — local eSIM or not, no SIM reaches a mast that isn't there. I'd learned to download my offline map and screenshot the guesthouse address before leaving town, so that when the bars vanished I still knew where I was going. And if you have more days than I did, this is where Georgia really opens up: west of the Military Road lies Svaneti, a remote high-mountain region of medieval stone defensive towers and villages that feel closer to the sky than the rest of the country — beautiful, hard to reach, and even patchier for signal. I ran out of time and only traced it on the map, promising myself I'd come back.

Kakheti: 8,000 years of wine in a clay egg

Then I turned east, into Kakheti, the wine country, and into the oldest unbroken winemaking tradition on earth. Georgians have made wine for around 8,000 years, and they still do it the ancient way: not in barrels but in qvevri, huge egg-shaped clay vessels buried up to the neck in the ground, where the juice ferments on its skins through the cold winter. The method is on UNESCO's list of intangible heritage, and the amber wines it produces — tannic, a little wild, tasting of orchard and earth — are like nothing from a French cellar. Near Telavi a family opened the cellar floor to show me the clay lids of their qvevri, sunk into the soil like a row of sleeping eggs. That evening I was folded into a supra, the Georgian feast, where a tamada — the appointed toastmaster — leads the table through long, rising toasts to peace, to ancestors, to guests, to Georgia. You do not sip through a supra; you commit. I understood almost none of the words — Georgian has its own beautiful, looping alphabet, unlike anything else — but I understood the warmth completely. By the end of the night a man I'd met two hours earlier was calling me his sister.

What I take away

Georgia gave me three images I won't lose: a stone church holding its ground under a 5,000-metre mountain, a buried clay egg full of 8,000-year-old wine, and a table of strangers toasting me as if I'd always belonged there. It's a country that wears Europe and Asia at the same time, a candidate to join the EU but not a member, still entirely itself. Go for the Military Road and the church under Kazbek; stay for the supra and the wine that tastes of the ground it grew in. Just don't make my mistake at the border of the network — sort your connection before the mountains take it away.

— Sarah, somewhere above the clouds, watching Kazbek decide whether to show its face.