Kakheti with children, which is easier than it looks

A waitress will take your baby off you. Not offer — take, competently, and walk off towards the kitchen with her. It takes most parents about a day to stop finding this alarming and about three to start relying on it.

That is the character of travelling here with children, and it is not a quirk. It runs through everything from the restaurants to the cellars to the fact that there is no such thing as an adults-only Georgian dinner.

The food question, which is the one people actually worry about

Georgian food is one of the easier cuisines in Europe to feed a child on, and the reason is that none of it is hot. The “spice” here is herbs, walnut and garlic, not chilli. Nothing on a Kakhetian table will burn a five-year-old’s mouth.

What children eat here without a negotiation:

• Khachapuri. Cheese bread. There is no child on earth who needs this explained.
• Shoti — the canoe-shaped bread out of the clay oven — and mchadi, the flat cornbread, which is naturally gluten-free if that matters to you.
• Khinkali. The big pleated dumplings. You eat them with your hands, you bite a hole and drink the broth first, and you leave the topknots on the plate to be counted at the end — which is a game, and the only table manners lesson we have ever seen a child volunteer for. The full method.
• Matsoni with honey. The local yoghurt, sharp, and the honey fixes it.
• Lobio, the bean stew, and cucumber-and-tomato salad, which is on every table.
• Churchkhela, which is walnuts and grape juice and nothing else, and reads as a sweet.
• Adjaruli khachapuri — the boat-shaped one with an egg and butter dropped in — is essentially a savoury craft project and is worth ordering once for the theatre.

Portions are large enough that you rarely need to order for a small child at all. Tarragon lemonade is bright green, faintly medicinal, and is the drink they will talk about afterwards.

The genuinely awkward bit — car seats

Everything above is why this region is easy with children. This is the part that is not, and it is worth sorting before you book a transfer rather than at the kerb.

The law says children under 12 travel in the back, and under-threes in a child seat, with a 50-lari fine. In practice, taxis do not carry seats, transfer drivers do not carry seats unless you asked in advance and confirmed twice, and a marshrutka has no meaningful seatbelts at all.

If you need a car seat, the workable answers are: bring your own — most airlines carry them free — or hire a car and specify seats at the time of booking, or ask whoever is arranging your transfer in writing, well ahead, and get an answer rather than a reassurance. The wider car-or-driver question is separate, but the seat question sits on top of it and is not solved by choosing either.

The argument for Kakheti specifically

Nothing is far. Ikalto 8 km, Shumi 9, Tsinandali 12, Alaverdi 20, Gremi 28. Nobody is in a vehicle for more than about forty minutes. Compare that with Svaneti or Tusheti, where the road is the activity and it is six hours long, and this becomes the obvious region to bring a child to.

And it is flat. The valley floor is easy walking and easy pushing, once you are out of the town centre.

The supra with children in it

Children are at the table. Not a separate table, not fed earlier, not sent off — at the table, and frequently still there at eleven at night, and asleep on somebody by midnight.

They get toasted, by name, and are expected to raise a glass of lemonade in reply. They will be passed around, fed by strangers, and told they are beautiful in three languages. If your child needs warning about this, warn them; if they will enjoy it, they are going to have an extremely good evening. How a supra works, for the adults’ half of it.

Wine days with children, which do work

Better than the phrase “wine tour” suggests, as long as you do one cellar and not three.

The estates have gardens — Tsinandali’s is a proper park with paths and shade, and children can be let go in it while you do the cellar. A family marani has a yard, a dog, a cat, chickens, usually a grandmother who will remove your child from you within four minutes, and quite often cousins of roughly the right age. What actually happens at one — and it is three to five hours, so pick the day for it.

What does not work is a schedule with three tastings on it. Do one, in the morning, and go back to wherever you are staying for the afternoon.

Things that entertain them here

The market, before ten. The wall of churchkhela hanging in ropes, the live fish, sacks of spice you can put a hand in, cheese being cut. Better than most museums and it costs nothing.

The plane tree. Nine hundred years old, five hundred metres from our door, and the trunk is hollow enough to stand inside, which is the photograph.

Batonis Tsikhe. Walls, a bath house, two churches and a palace inside one enclosure, and — this is the useful part — it is small. About 7 lari for an adult, and it has been open 10:00 to 18:00, Tuesday to Sunday, closed Mondays. An hour and a half is plenty.

Ikalto, of all places, which has open qvevri mouths in the ground among the ruins that you can look down into. Children find a hole in the floor considerably more interesting than a nave, and the monastery is empty most days.

Nekresi, because you leave the car at the bottom and take a shuttle bus up the hill, and a vehicle counts as an activity.

Practical

112 is the emergency number, free from any phone on any network, and the operators often speak English.

Pharmacies are marked with a green cross or აფთიაქი; the chains are Aversi, PSP and GPC. A great many things that need a prescription at home are over the counter here, which is convenient and worth being slightly careful with.

Nappies and formula are in the supermarkets in Telavi, in brands you may not recognise. Do not count on a village shop for either.

The insurance rule applies to children too. Since 1 January 2026 every foreign visitor to Georgia needs health and accident cover of at least 30,000 GEL for the whole stay, producible in Georgian or English at the border. That is per person, including the four-year-old.

Tap water is safe and good, in Telavi and generally in the region.

Street dogs. There are some, they are usually calm, and a plastic tag in one ear means the dog has been through the sterilisation and vaccination programme. They are still street dogs. The rule for children is the same as anywhere: do not run at one, do not run away from one, do not touch one that is eating.

Pavements. Telavi’s are uneven, high-kerbed and periodically absent. A pushchair is a fight here and a carrier is not. For a child small enough to be carried, carry them.

What this house has

Four rooms, each with its own terrace and its own bathroom, a garden with shade in it, a picnic area, an indoor play space and a shelf of board games and puzzles that exists because of children, not despite them. Breakfast is at eight and if that is the wrong time or the wrong food for a particular small person, say so the night before and it will be different.

The four rooms are genuinely different from each other and one of them is much better at this than the rest: Gombori is 35 square metres with a double and a bunk bed in it and the mountains through the window, and it sleeps four. Rtveli is the same size with a double, and Alazani takes three. Ask us about cots before you book rather than after.