Taking Georgian wine home — the limits, and what survives the flight

Georgia does not care how much wine you leave with. The four-litre figure people quote is the limit on bringing alcohol into Georgia, and nobody at Tbilisi departures is counting your bottles.

The limits that will actually cost you money are your own country’s, and they are much smaller than the number of bottles you will want by day three.

The allowances, per adult

Arriving in	Still wine	Also
The EU	4 litres	16 L beer, plus either 1 L spirits over 22% or 2 L fortified/sparkling. No allowance under 17
Great Britain	18 litres	42 L beer, 4 L spirits over 22%, 9 L of anything else up to 22%
The United States	1 litre	Duty-free, age 21+. More is allowed but dutiable, and your arrival state’s law applies

Those are the published figures as of September 2026, from the EU’s Your Europe portal, gov.uk and US Customs and Border Protection respectively. Check them again before you fly; they move.

Four litres is five and a bit bottles. That is the number that catches out everyone travelling back into the EU, because five bottles is roughly what one enthusiastic afternoon at a cellar produces. Eighteen litres, the British allowance, is twenty-four bottles, which is a different kind of holiday entirely.

Over the limit is not a crime. It is a declaration and some duty — in the US, wine duty runs at roughly a dollar or two a litre, which for a bottle you paid fifteen lari for at a cellar is still the best wine deal available to you. What you must not do is walk through the green channel with a case and hope.

What the airline will let you carry

Separate rules, and they bite before customs does.

Hold luggage. Anything under 24% alcohol — all wine — has no quantity limit under the international dangerous-goods rules. Between 24% and 70%, which is where chacha lives, you are limited to 5 litres per passenger and it must be in unopened retail packaging. Over 70% is forbidden outright, in the hold and the cabin.

That retail-packaging clause is the one that matters here, because the chacha somebody will give you at the end of lunch is in a plastic water bottle with a screw cap and a hand-written label, and it is not retail packaging by any reading.

Hand luggage. 100 ml, as everywhere. Wine bought airside is fine; if you are connecting through another airport, keep it in the sealed bag with the receipt visible or you may lose it at the second screening.

Weight. A full 750 ml bottle weighs about 1.25 kg. A 23 kg allowance is therefore about eighteen bottles and no clothes, or twelve bottles and a normal amount of luggage. Excess baggage on the flights out of Tbilisi will cost you more per bottle than the wine did.

What actually survives, and what does not

Estate bottles travel perfectly. Tsinandali, Shumi, Alaverdi’s SINCE1011, anything with a cork, a capsule and a label. Wrap them and forget them.

The bottle a grandfather fills for you will not. This is the honest paragraph. Family wine is usually unfiltered, often still faintly working, and it comes in whatever bottle was to hand — which in Kakheti is a two-litre lemonade bottle with the label soaked off. It is not sealed, it will weep at altitude, it will empty itself into your shirts, and the shirts will smell like a marani for the rest of their lives.

Take one anyway. Just take it in your own bottle, with a proper cork, standing upright in the middle of the case with clothes packed hard around it, inside two bags. Ask at the cellar — most families have empty bottles and a corker, because they bottle for their relatives in Tbilisi every year.

And be ready for it to taste different. Unfiltered qvevri wine that has never been shipped or stabilised does change after a week in a hold and a fortnight in a warm flat. More than that: it tasted the way it did because it was eleven in the morning, there was cheese, and the man who made it was watching you drink it. Some of that is not in the bottle. This is not a reason to skip it. It is a reason not to be disappointed in March.

Where to buy, in order of sense

At the cellar. Cheapest, and you will have met the person who made it. Take cash; the family cellars do not have card machines and the estates do.

In Telavi. The wine shops in town carry small producers you will not find in Tbilisi, at Telavi prices.

In Tbilisi. Good specialist shops, wider range, higher prices, and they will pack for a flight properly, which is worth something.

At the airport, last. The duty-free selection is narrow and the prices are the highest you will see in the country. It is where you buy the bottle you forgot, not the bottle you came for.

Packing it

The reliable method, in order:

1. Ask the winery for a polystyrene shipper — the moulded twelve-bottle insert. Most estates have them and many will give you one. It is better than anything you can improvise.
2. Failing that: bottles in the middle of the case, horizontal, wrapped individually, with soft clothes packed tight around and above them. Not against the wheels, not against the edges.
3. Inflatable wine sleeves work and weigh nothing. Bring them from home; you will not find them here.
4. Two plastic bags around each bottle regardless, because the failure mode is not a broken bottle, it is a wet suitcase.

We keep bathroom scales by the door and there is a reason for that, which is that guests keep needing them on the last morning. You are welcome to use them, and to leave anything that does not fit — several people have gone home with a lighter case and a bottle waiting for them next year.

Posting it

Do not put wine in a Georgian Post box. Sending alcohol internationally by post is legally awkward in most directions and generally requires a registered importer at the receiving end, and glass bottles in the ordinary post are a gamble at the best of times.

If you want more than you can carry, the answer is a winery that already exports and has a courier account. Ask them directly. Typical cost through a specialist runs somewhere around €15–30 a bottle delivered and two to four weeks, which makes sense for a case of something you cannot get at home and no sense at all for six bottles of Rkatsiteli.

What we would take

Four bottles, if you are flying into the EU and want to stay inside the allowance:

• One Tsinandali or another European-style Kakhetian white, because it is the tradition Chavchavadze started twelve kilometres from here and it is a good thing to be able to buy again.
• One qvevri Rkatsiteli — the amber one — because it is the thing that does not exist properly anywhere else, and because opening it at home in February is the whole point.
• One Saperavi with some age on it, which will keep and will be better in three years.
• One from the family cellar, in a bottle you corked yourself, drunk within a month, with somebody you want to tell about it.

And a bag of blue fenugreek and dried marigold from the market, which weigh nothing, cost almost nothing, get through every customs hall on earth, and will do more for your cooking for the next year than any of the wine.

If you are staying with us and you have got yourself into a packing problem on the last morning, say so at breakfast rather than at the door. It is a solvable problem and we have solved it before.