Telavi is the capital of Kakheti, Georgia's great wine region, and the best base for immersing yourself in the land where wine was born more than 8,000 years ago. Unlike pretty, picture-postcard Sighnaghi, Telavi is a real provincial town, with its everyday life, its market, its royal fortress and its famous ancient plane tree, perched above the wide Alazani River valley, with the imposing wall of the snowy Greater Caucasus in front of it. It's authentic, flavourful and unpretentious, and the best of Kakheti fans out from here.
Because Kakheti is, above all, wine. Here, in the Alazani valley and on its slopes, the great native Georgian grape varieties are grown (the red Saperavi, the whites Rkatsiteli, Kisi and Mtsvane), and wine is made using the ancestral qvevri method: clay jars buried in the ground in which the grapes ferment with their skins, producing the distinctive amber wines, a method recognised as World Heritage. From Telavi you can visit everything from large historic wineries to small family houses and the workshops of master craftsmen who still make qvevri by hand.
And on top of the wine there's a first-class historical and religious heritage: Alaverdi Cathedral, one of the tallest and oldest in Georgia, with a thousand-year monastic winemaking tradition; the medieval academy of Ikalto, among old moss-covered qvevri; the ruins of Gremi and Nekresi; and the elegant Tsinandali estate, where modern Georgian wine was born. This guide helps you use Telavi as a base camp for tasting, eating, visiting monasteries and discovering why Kakheti is the flavourful, ancient heart of Georgia.
Telavi is a very old town, already mentioned in sources more than a thousand years old as a trading centre on the routes that crossed Kakheti. It reached its peak between the 17th and 18th centuries, when it became the capital of the Kingdom of Kakheti and later of the unified Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti. This was the court of King Erekle II (Heraclius II), one of the great Georgian monarchs, born in Telavi in 1720, who from his royal fortress (Batonis Tsikhe castle) ruled and fought to defend Georgia against the Persians, the Ottomans and raids from the north. In the early 19th century, along with the rest of Georgia, Kakheti was annexed by the Russian Empire. Over the following centuries Telavi remained the administrative and commercial centre of the wine region. Today it is the capital of Kakheti and the base for Georgian wine tourism. That history of kings, wine and frontier is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Georgia's wine country in the east: the Alazani Valley and its ancient vineyards, the hilltop town of Sighnaghi, the Telavi wine route and the rock-cut monasteries of Davit Gareja.
Read the history of Kakheti: the land of wine →They depart from Tbilisi, 61 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Telavi is a child of Kakheti, and Kakheti is one of the oldest and most distinctive regions of Georgia. It lies in the east of the country, in the wide valley of the Alazani River at the foot of the Greater Caucasus. Since ancient times it has been fertile land, rich in vines and wheat. It has also been a crossroads of trade routes linking Georgia with the North Caucasus, the Persian world and the steppes. Goods, ideas and armies travelled along those routes, and towns like Telavi grew up as centres of trade.
Telavi has appeared in written sources for more than a thousand years. A 10th-century Arab geographer already mentions it, and we know it was an important stop on the roads that crossed Kakheti. But what defines this land above all else is wine. Kakheti is the heart of Georgian winemaking, and Georgia is, according to archaeological evidence, the cradle of wine: the oldest traces of winemaking in the world, some 8,000 years old, have been found here. The traditional qvevri method was born and perfected in these lands. Qvevri are clay jars buried in the ground, where the grapes ferment with their skins. UNESCO has declared the method Intangible Cultural Heritage.
In Kakheti, wine is not just another industry: it is at the centre of everyday life, the table, celebrations and identity. Every family has its marani (wine cellar) and its qvevri, and social life revolves around the supra (feast), with toasts led by the tamada. Telavi, as the capital of the region, is the gateway to a world where history, faith and wine have been woven together for millennia.
Medieval Kakheti was a great centre of faith and learning, and some of the most important monuments of that period are clustered around Telavi. Saint Nino brought Christianity to Georgia in the 4th century, and it soon took root here. From the 6th century, the so-called 'Thirteen Assyrian Fathers', monks who came to spread the faith and found monasteries, left their mark. Foundations such as Ikalto and Nekresi, near Telavi, are attributed to them, and they are among the oldest monastic complexes in the country.
During Georgia's golden age, between the 11th and 13th centuries, Kakheti flourished along with the rest of the kingdom. In the 11th century the imposing Alaverdi Cathedral was built. At more than 50 metres high, it is one of the largest churches in Georgia, and it has an unbroken monastic winemaking tradition dating back to 1011: the monks of Alaverdi have made wine in qvevri for a thousand years, a perfect example of faith and wine going hand in hand. The Ikalto Academy, which grew in the 12th century in the time of David the Builder, was a major centre of learning. Students there studied theology, philosophy and the sciences, but also practical skills such as viticulture, winemaking and pottery. Tradition holds that Shota Rustaveli, the national poet and author of 'The Knight in the Panther's Skin', studied there.
These monasteries and academies make the area around Telavi an open-air museum of medieval Christian Georgia, where learning, prayer and vine growing went on side by side within the same walls. The old moss-covered qvevri still visible at Ikalto are the perfect symbol of the age-old bond between monastery and wine that defines Kakheti.
After the great unified Kingdom of Georgia broke apart, from the 14th and 15th centuries onwards Kakheti became an independent kingdom with its own monarchs. It was a time of wealth, with wine, silk and trade all thriving, but also of enormous danger. Kakheti sat on the eastern edge of Georgian Christendom, caught between two great Muslim empires fighting over the Caucasus: Safavid Persia and the Ottoman Empire. The kings of Kakheti had to manoeuvre between the two constantly, sometimes accepting Persian overlordship in order to survive.
That position brought terrible tragedies. The capital of the kingdom at the time was Gremi, a rich and thriving city on the trade routes near Telavi. In 1615 the powerful Persian ruler Shah Abbas I (Abbas the Great), campaigning to subdue Georgia, razed Gremi and devastated Kakheti. Soon after, in 1616–1617, the shah carried out a brutal campaign of punishment and deportation: tens of thousands of Kakhetians were massacred or deported to Persia in an attempt to break Georgian resistance and replace the population. It was one of the bloodiest episodes in the region's history. Kakheti was left empty and ruined, and Gremi never recovered as a capital.
Under this constant threat, the royal capital moved to Telavi, which became the new seat of power in Kakheti in the 17th century. This was when the town reached its greatest splendour, with the building of the royal fortress of Batonis Tsikhe. Kakheti kept fighting for survival between the empires, in a story of resistance, destruction and rebirth that left a deep mark on the region and its people.
The 18th century was Telavi's great era, and it is inseparable from the figure of its most famous son: Erekle II (Heraclius II), one of the most important and admired kings in Georgian history. Erekle was born into the royal family in Telavi in 1720. He came to rule Kakheti and later the united Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti, which covered all of eastern Georgia. From his royal fortress of Batonis Tsikhe, in the centre of Telavi, he ruled for decades through exceptionally hard times.
Erekle was both a warrior and a reformer. He fought tirelessly to defend and strengthen his kingdom against threats on every side: raids by Daghestani tribes who plundered Kakheti, pressure from Persia and the Ottoman Empire, and the general instability of the Caucasus. He modernised the army and the administration, founded a printing press and a school, and tried to give eastern Georgia some stability and progress. A brave and tragic figure, he embodies the Georgian people's struggle to survive as a Christian nation surrounded by Muslim empires.
Seeking lasting protection from the Persians and Ottomans, in 1783 Erekle signed the Treaty of Georgievsk with the Russian Empire, placing Kartli-Kakheti under Russian protection in exchange for guarantees of defence. But that protection failed tragically: in 1795 the Persian shah Agha Mohammad Khan invaded Georgia and sacked Tbilisi, and Russia did not come to help in time. Erekle, by then an old man, died shortly afterwards. His dream of a protected Georgia ended differently: in 1801, just a few years after his death, the Russian Empire annexed the kingdom outright instead of protecting it, ending Georgian independence.
After the Russian annexation at the start of the 19th century, Telavi and all of Kakheti became just another province of the Russian Empire. After centuries of wars and raids, it was a period of relative peace, and the region could focus on what it did best: making wine. In the 19th century Kakheti's wine culture went through a revival and a modernisation. The symbol of that change is the Tsinandali estate near Telavi, where Prince Alexander Chavchavadze introduced European techniques and in 1841 bottled the first European-style Georgian wine, giving birth to modern Georgian wine.
In the Soviet period, after Georgia was absorbed into the USSR in 1921, Kakheti became the main wine-producing region of the Soviet Union, and much of its output was industrialised to supply the whole country. Mass production came at a cost to quality and diversity, because a handful of grape varieties and industrial methods were favoured. Fortunately, the qvevri tradition and home-made wine survived within families, kept like a cultural treasure that held out against the concrete of the big factories. Telavi remained the administrative and commercial centre of the region.
After Georgia's independence in 1991 and the hard years that followed, Kakheti and Telavi found a new direction in the 21st century: wine tourism. Qvevri wine has been rediscovered internationally, amber ('orange') wines have become fashionable, and people are curious about this ancient wine culture. Together, these have turned Telavi into the capital of the wine route and a base for thousands of travellers who come to taste wine, visit wineries and monasteries, and experience Georgia's legendary hospitality. Erekle II's birthplace, with its royal fortress, its thousand-year-old plane tree and its vineyards at the foot of the Caucasus, is still the heart of wine country, just as it was centuries ago.
