Rtveli — what the Georgian grape harvest actually involves

If you can pick when to come to Kakheti, come for rtveli. Nothing else in the Georgian year comes close, and it is not something staged for visitors — it is simply the fortnight when the entire region has the same job.

When it happens

Roughly mid-September to mid-October. The exact dates move each year with the weather, and they move by grape: whites generally come in first, Saperavi later.

If you want a specific week, ask us in July or August and we will tell you what the season looks like. And book early — this is the hardest fortnight of the year to find a bed in Kakheti, and we only have four rooms.

What actually happens

You cut grapes. Early, because it gets hot. You are given secateurs and a crate and shown which bunches to leave. It is repetitive and companionable and much harder on your back than you expect.

You carry them. Crates go to the trailer, the trailer goes to the marani.

You crush them. In a proper family cellar this still happens in a satsnakheli — a hollowed-out log, often a single trunk, sometimes generations old. You take your shoes off, you get in, and you tread. The juice runs down the log into a qvevri, the big clay vessel buried up to its neck in the floor.

Then it goes underground. Skins, stems and all, for the Kakhetian method. Sealed with a stone lid and clay, and left for months. That is where amber wine comes from, and Georgia has been doing it for about eight thousand years.

And then the supra

The work stops in the early afternoon and the table starts, and the table is the point.

A Georgian supra is run by a tamada, the toastmaster, and it has an order to it. Toasts go to peace, to the dead, to parents, to children, to the guests — and each one is a small speech, not a shout of “cheers”. You drink when the toast is made and not really in between, which sounds restrictive and turns out to be the only thing keeping anyone upright.

You will be toasted as a guest. You may be asked to make one. Say something honest and short. Nobody is grading you.

Expect the food to keep arriving after you are full. This is deliberate; a table you can see the cloth through is a failure of hospitality.

What to bring

• Closed shoes you do not mind ruining, and clothes the same
• A hat — September in Kakheti is still hot
• Sun cream
• Something warm for the evening; the temperature drops properly once the sun is off the valley
• Very little else

How to actually get into one

This is the part guides skip. Rtveli is a family event. You cannot buy a ticket to a real one, and the versions sold as day trips out of Tbilisi are usually a demonstration with a nice lunch attached.

What works is knowing somebody. We live here, we have four rooms, and the families whose cellars we send guests to are people we actually know. If you are staying with us during rtveli, tell us and we will arrange for you to spend a morning in a working vineyard and an afternoon at the table that follows.

That is genuinely the whole trick to Kakheti: everything good here runs on somebody knowing somebody.