Château Mukhrani

Château Mukhrani is the one Georgian winery that was deliberately built to look French, and it still does. A two-storey palace with a mansard roof stands at the end of a tree-lined avenue on the Mukhrani plain, twenty minutes west of Mtskheta, with vineyards running out towards the Ksani.

The estate belonged to the Mukhranbatoni, a branch of the Bagrationi royal house that held the principality of Mukhrani from the 16th century. In the 1870s Prince Ivane Mukhranbatoni built the palace, laid out a park, and did something more unusual: he planted French vines alongside Georgian ones, imported French cellar practice, and put up an industrial-scale winery on the estate. His bottles were shown at European exhibitions in the 1880s, at a time when Georgian wine barely travelled at all.

The Soviet state took the property in 1921. The palace lost its roof and its interiors, the park ran wild, and for seventy years the buildings stood as a shell. Restoration began in 2002, the winery reopened in 2007, and the palace itself was finished later.

What you actually see on a visit:

• the restored palace, furnished in period style rather than with original pieces

• the 19th-century tunnel cellar, brick-vaulted, cool in any weather and still used for ageing

• a marani of buried qvevri, where the traditional skin-contact whites are made

• the park, a formal French layout with a long allée, and the working vineyards behind it

The wines are Saperavi, Rkatsiteli, Goruli Mtsvane, Shavkapito and Tavkveri, made in both European and qvevri styles. The interesting thing is to taste the same grape done both ways. September and early October, during the harvest, are the liveliest weeks; in January the park is bare and the visit is mostly indoors.