Khareba Wine Tunnel

This is not a cellar but a tunnel driven into a mountain. The Khareba tunnel runs north of Kvareli into the slope of the Greater Caucasus: the main gallery is about 7.7 kilometres long, with roughly fifteen side corridors branching off it.

It was excavated in the 1950s and had nothing to do with wine. The original purpose was strategic — shelter and storage, cut deep enough to survive most things. Only later did anyone notice that conditions inside are close to ideal for ageing wine: the rock holds 12 to 14°C the year round and humidity sits near 70 per cent, without a single unit of refrigeration or humidity control.

A visit means walking one branch and back. Racks line the walls, some of the bottles furred with mould, which is deliberate: a damp wall keeps corks in better condition than a dry one. The air is cold and completely still. In August, when it is 35°C in the car park, the first thirty seconds inside are a shock.

The tour ends with a tasting, mostly of Kakhetian varieties — Saperavi, Rkatsiteli, the semi-sweet Kindzmarauli, and the less common Khikhvi. The complex also has a restaurant where shoti bread is baked in a tone oven and churchkhela is made in front of you. It is staged for visitors, but the bread is genuinely good.

Is it worth it? If you have already seen several marani, the tunnel still gives you something different: scale and cold. If you are short of time, tasting in Kvareli itself is cheaper, quieter and just as instructive about the wine.

The tunnel also explains something about the last century of Georgian wine. Storage on this state scale kept enormous volumes moving for the Soviet market while small family marani were pushed to the margins, and the revival of qvevri winemaking since the 1990s has been a deliberate reversal of exactly that.