Why go
Kotekhi is a village of stone maranis—underground wine cellars carved into hillsides centuries ago, where families still ferment qvevri wines using methods unchanged since the Bronze Age. Unlike tourist-facing wineries, Kotekhi offers unscripted hospitality: farmers who crush grapes with bare feet in autumn, who will uncork last year's saperavi from clay vessels and insist you stay for supra. The village sits on the Telavi-Gurjaani road amid some of Kakheti's oldest vine terraces, where the Alazani Valley's light and limestone soils have drawn winemakers for millennia. This is Kakheti before the tasting rooms—working vineyards, generational knowledge, and the hum of qvevri being sealed for spring.