We are not a hotel with a tour desk. We just know everybody.

You start with the dough, because everything here starts with the dough. We show you how the cheese gets worked, how the round is closed, and how to tell when the oven is ready without a thermometer.

Depending on the day and what came back from the market, you might also make mchadi, badrijani with walnut, or a pot of chakapuli in spring when the tarragon is up.

Then everyone sits down and eats it, which takes considerably longer than making it did. Wine is on the table.

We do not run a fixed tour. We ask what you actually like, then we call the people we know.

That might be a family marani where the qvevri are under the floor of the yard and the grandfather does the pouring, or it might be Tsinandali and Shumi if you want the polished version. Usually it is one of each.

A driver takes you, which matters, because tasting in Kakheti is not a small pour and the roads back over Gombori are not forgiving.

Rtveli is the grape harvest and it is the biggest thing that happens in this region all year. Everything stops for it.

If you come between mid-September and mid-October we can put you in a working vineyard for a morning. You cut grapes, you carry them, you get in the satsnakheli and crush them with your feet, and afterwards there is a table that goes on for hours with a tamada running it.

It is not a performance laid on for visitors. It is what the family was going to be doing that day regardless.

The palace, the plane tree, the market, the bits of wall that are older than all of it, and the streets in between that are not on anybody's list.

Most people do Telavi in forty minutes on the way to somewhere else. This is the version where you find out what you were walking past.

Flights into Tbilisi land at unkind hours and the marshrutka does not care. We can have someone waiting with your name at arrivals.

The road goes over the Gombori pass, which is the pretty way, and takes about two hours. In winter, if the pass is closed, the driver takes the longer route through Sagarejo and it is closer to three.

Kakheti rewards a car. The monasteries at Nekresi and Alaverdi, the citadel at Gremi, the road up to Tusheti if you have the nerve and a 4x4 — none of it is convenient without one.

We can arrange a car and, if you would rather not drive here, a driver with it.