Tbilisi Podcast · Eat This! Food & Wine Tours Georgia

Georgia Travel Guide Part 2: Unmissable Destinations and Hidden Gems to Explore

·51 min·3 clips

Vardzia is far enough from Borjomi that a day trip can mean five hours on a bus.

Wine harvest season sets the tone. The hosts open with a limited run of authentic family harvest tours, where guests can join a family and their friends, help make wine, and finish with a supra hosted by the winemaker. Only seven of these tours are running this year, in small groups of seven to twelve people. They contrast that with the more common tourist version, where visitors show up to a larger winery to simulate harvest and can book in advance even when the real picking dates do not line up. If the weather and calendar work, they clearly prefer the real thing, because you are actually helping the family make their wine. The trip then shifts north toward Kazbegi and the Gergeti church. They talk through the view from the hill and note that going in the morning or around noon changes what you get behind the church, especially for photographers chasing the mountains. Stepantsminda comes up as a village that has mostly become a tourist hub. Hotels, guest houses, and a limited set of restaurants now dominate it. They mention a small restaurant in Gergeti on the way up the hill, admit they cannot remember the name on air, and promise to put it into the show notes. Rooms Hotel gets the strongest praise. The terrace is massive, the valley view is panoramic, and the cocktails and food make it an easy place to linger. A hike to Kveleti waterfall is the next target. They push back on any blog that calls it an easy stroll, saying that description is wildly misleading for a normal tourist. For someone already doing the four-day Ushguli hike in three days, maybe it feels easy. For everyone else, it is a real climb with rocks, effort, and a bad fit for people with mobility problems. One of them says they had to carry a two-year-old the whole way. The episode closes by circling back to off-track trips and lesser-known wineries, especially for groups of four or more. They say they sometimes lead those trips themselves, which keeps the invitation personal instead of generic. The last beat is a friendly sign-off pointing listeners to the website, social links, newsletter, and the promise of another episode later on.

As heard by us

Wine harvest logistics, Kazbegi detours, and a blunt warning about hikes that are not easy.

Georgia travel talk sets the frame, but the piece keeps drifting back to the practical question of how to move through the country with some local judgment: when a wine harvest is worth chasing, why Kazbegi justifies the detour, and which easy hikes are not easy at all.

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Why you'd press play

Georgia harvest season, small-group family wine picking, and a supra after the work is done.

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