The Georgian tradition of hospitality has a name — mkurnaloba — and a form, and the form is this: you do not enter a Georgian home or sit at a Georgian table without being fed and without being toasted, and the toasting is conducted by a tamada, a toastmaster, whose role is to guide the supra — the feast — through a sequence of toasts that begins with God and moves through the homeland, the ancestors, the guests, love, and peace before arriving, eventually, at the table’s own personal reasons for celebration. I first experienced this at a table in Tbilisi’s Sololaki neighbourhood on my second evening in the city, at a dinner I had been invited to by someone I had met for forty minutes, and I left four hours later having drunk more amber wine than I had planned and having understood more about what Georgian culture values than three days of sightseeing had produced. Tbilisi teaches you its priorities in order, and hospitality comes first.

The Old Town: Centuries Stacked Without Apology

Tbilisi’s old town is the kind of place that makes the word “charming” feel insufficient and slightly patronising — the carved wooden balconies projecting over the narrow streets of Abanotubani, painted in the colours of things that have faded beautifully rather than things that were chosen to be beautiful, the Persian-influenced bathhouses with their domed brick roofs and their sulphur springs below, the Armenian church and the synagogue and the mosque and the Orthodox cathedral all within walking distance of each other, the city’s centuries of occupation and influence layered on top of each other with a confidence that only comes from a place that has survived enough history to stop being surprised by it. Narikala fortress on the hill above — built in the 4th century, destroyed and rebuilt by Arabs and Mongols and Persians and Russians, now a shell of beautiful walls open to the sky — looks out over the city with the patience of something that has seen everything and is still here. The cable car to the top takes four minutes. The view takes considerably longer to absorb.

The Wine: Eight Thousand Years of Getting It Right

Georgia is the oldest wine-producing country in the world — archaeological evidence of winemaking dates to 6000 BC, which means Georgia was making wine before Egypt built the pyramids and approximately eight thousand years before Robert Parker started scoring things. The qvevri method — fermenting grapes with their skins and seeds in large clay vessels buried in the earth — produces the amber wines that have recently become fashionable in natural wine circles worldwide but that Georgia has been making continuously since before the concept of fashion existed. Drinking amber wine in Tbilisi — at a wine bar in Vera or a restaurant in Abanotubani, with churchkhela (walnut and grape juice candy) and sulguni cheese alongside — is drinking eight thousand years of unbroken practice in a single glass. The wine is extraordinary. The context makes it more so.

The Sulphur Baths: The Original Reason the City Exists

Legend holds that Tbilisi was founded in the 5th century by King Vakhtang Gorgasali, who discovered the hot sulphur springs in the valley while hunting — his falcon caught a pheasant, both fell into the springs, and the king found them cooked. The king built a city around the springs, which is either a practical decision or the most Georgian possible origin story for a city, because it involves hunting, hot water, and accidentally cooking a bird. The sulphur bath houses of Abanotubani — domed brick buildings above the springs, private rooms with marble tubs, water at 37 degrees that smells of sulphur and leaves the skin impossibly soft — have been operating continuously since the 5th century. A private room for two hours costs approximately fifteen dollars. It is the best fifteen dollars available in the Caucasus.

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Tbilisi gives you the wine and the fortress and the baths and then, when you think you have understood the city, invites you to a supra and shows you what it actually values. Accept every invitation. Stay longer than you planned. This is not optional.