Georgia is a small country with a huge appetite for life. This passion is evident in all aspects of the country’s extraordinary culture, from its ancient polyphonic songs and breathtaking national dances to its rich culinary heritage and winemaking tradition that goes back eight millennia. To become better acquainted with this unique region, we have organized a seven-day trip in partnership with Atlas Obscura – “In the Cradle of Wine: A Georgian Culinary Adventure” – that focuses on all the senses, with special emphasis on taste. It is a mouthwatering, belt-popping, intimate dive into the heart of Georgia.

While wandering deep in the guts of the Deserter’s Bazaar, Tbilisi’s largest and oldest open-air marketplace, we stumbled upon the raffish wine section where men (mostly) drop by for a few toasts. Join our Old Market & Beyond walk to taste these authentic homemade wines and chacha – Georgia’s legendary take on grappa – for yourself.

It wasn’t so long ago that no one would venture to Georgia’s Svaneti region without a personal invitation, and even that was risky. Isolated, sky-high in the Caucasus, nestled between the breakaway territory of Abkhazia and the Russian Federation, it was land of the lost, inhabited by a tribe speaking their own language, living in hamlets dominated by tall medieval stone towers used for protection from invading hordes as well as from each other. Ancient pagan-Christian rituals, bride-napping, blood vendettas and banditry defined modern Svaneti – at least when viewed from the outside. We had heard too many stories of how oblivious tourists would wander there with cameras around their necks and big tourist grins only to return in their underwear with their heads hanging low. Like Georgians from the rest of the country, we stayed away.

On June 20, Georgian Prime Minister Mamuka Bakhtadze signed a decree abolishing the Writer’s House of Georgia, Tbilisi’s leading institution of literary culture and the home of Cafe Littera, the restaurant that gave birth to the culinary revolution Georgia is currently going through. As soon as the ink was dry, the Writer’s House accounts were frozen and its directors were suddenly dismissed with only half a month’s salary. The fate of Cafe Littera is unknown. The story of the Writer’s House goes back to 1905, when philanthropist and father of Georgian brandy, David Sarajishvili, completed construction of an Art Nouveau masterpiece of a house to commemorate his 25th wedding anniversary to Ekaterine Porakishvili.

We bit into the khinkali, its handmade dough indelicate and sticky, as we like it. Steam poured out the newly made hole, and we blew lightly before slurping up the rich stock and gobbling the dumpling down, even the puckered knob. The ground pork and beef was packed with fresh cilantro, the juices absorbed into the jacket. It was a perfect khinkali. A home wrecker. This seducer of a dumpling is molded by the knowing hands of Manana Osapashvili, born in Gudamakhari, a mountain village in Pasanauri, the heartland of khinkali. A professional cook for 29 years, Manana has been making khinkali since she was 10 years old. Today, she is running the kitchen at Sioni 13, located at the Tbilisi Theological Seminary in Old Town. It is a part of the city known for its tourists and hookah bars, and the mediocre "traditionnel" Georgian restaurants that cater to them.

Guda cheese is sheep cheese from eastern Georgia, aged in guda, which is sheep skin. Nowadays most guda is aged in plastic, but we found one vendor at the Deserter’s Bazaar who has the real deal in her stall, which comes from Tusheti in the high Caucasus.

You pass through the doleful Imeretian coal town of Tkibuli, wind 750 meters up the Nakerala pass and just as you catch your breath from the climb, you lose it again dropping down from the summit, for you have entered Racha-Lechkhumi, one of the most gorgeous regions in Georgia. We were first here in 2004, for an art festival organized by a local poet who had the unnerving habit of always speaking in verse. Since that mind-bending weekend, the regional capital of Ambrolauri hasn’t changed much. There is a new little airport, a few modest hotels, a couple humble restaurants, and a giant bottle of Khvanchkara that still stands in the middle of town, though it has been renovated. The vibe is as mellow as ever.

There was a large table made from a huge buzzsaw blade, covered in Russian and Western photo magazines. A greasy boombox played jazz, blues and classic rock cassettes. Behind the high wooden counter was a somber, dark-haired young woman who served semi-cold Argo beer for 3 lari a bottle and a simple lunch for a few lari more. We had found our watering hole. Apollo had been designed by local artist Guga Kotetishvili, a name we wouldn’t know until 2004, when he helped two young Apollo regulars auspiciously launch an entrepreneurial gastro-dominion with the opening of Cafe Kala on Erekle II Street, a narrow, 100-meter lane in Old Town. Back then, there was nothing else on the street.

West Georgia's climate is ideal for tea, and Georgia has been producing high quality tea since 1847. On our Old Market & Beyond culinary walk in Tbilisi, we get a chance to see, smell and taste fine samples of tea and other delicacies in the Dezerter's Bazaar - the Georgian capital’s largest and oldest open-air marketplace.

We were strolling through the Dezerter’s Bazaar building when a little woman, about 5 feet tall, interrupted a pair of our German guests with “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” Instantly charmed by her bright expression and linguistic dexterity, they stopped and chatted away in German. That’s how Tina Nugzarashvili became a must-stop on our Tbilisi market walk. Tina occupies stall number 10 in a building that used to be the epicenter of Tbilisi’s main farmer’s market, two blocks from the central train station. The old structure, built in the 1960s, was an enormous space under a tin dome crammed with mountains of corn and wheat flour, wheels of cheese stacked a meter high, plastic buckets of spices, pyramids of corn-fed chickens, and piles of fruits and vegetables, some neon red, others green and orange.

Ask anyone what they know about Georgian food and they’re sure to mention khachapuri, a baked barge of dough packing a cargo of gooey cheese. While khachapuri in its many forms is perhaps the best known Georgian dish abroad, we sample the equally delicious if less flashy tonis lobiani, a traditional bean-stuffed bread, on our market walk.

There is a day in February when we raise our noses to the sky like dogs and catch the first teasing wisps of spring. Our eyes widen, we nod and chime with giddy grins, “It’s coming.” Then the weather turns with a cold snap or even snow and we forget all about spring until one day in mid-March we wake up, pour a coffee, peer out the window and cry out, “Whoa, look!” jabbing our forefingers towards our tkemali tree and its little white flowers that bloomed overnight; the first blossoms of the year. No fruit says springtime greater than tkemali, which is a cherry plum (prunus cerasifera) harvested young, when it is exquisitely sour. Together with fresh tarragon, it is the basis of the mandatory Easter dish, chakapuli. People are stocked with preserved sour plums just in case Easter falls too early on the calendar.

We used to live near the Mtkvari River, in a ground-floor apartment with a single window looking into our courtyard, which was a dirt parking lot. The sun never made it to our window but every morning at the crack of eight, a woman would wake us with the melodious croon of “ma-tso-ni, mat-so-ni!” And if that didn’t wake us, her incessant tapping on our window certainly did. The payoff, however, was a jar full of the thickest, creamiest, most refreshing homemade yogurt, with just a perfect hint of tartness. So, we would shuffle out of bed, open the window and exchange our empty jars with her full ones.

On our mouthwatering multi-day Georgia trip, organized in collaboration with Atlas Obscura, we explore the birthplace of wine. The trip includes a stop in the hills around Ateni for a feast and natural wine tasting at Andro Barnovi winery – Andro, our host, walks us through the winemaking process and also prepares a luscious country supper.

Ivane Tarkhnishvili Street is a 300-meter stretch of blacktop in the Vera neighborhood that links the lower part of the quarter to the upper part. We used to drop off clothes for dry cleaning here and meet for coffee at Kafe Literaturuli, two establishments lost to the dustbin of time. For several years, we had no reason to venture to this part of the hood, until a friend tipped us off to a new place that opened last September. It’s called Pepperboy, and it is the one restaurant in Georgia that will take you on a wildly delectable ride through pan-Asian cuisines.