Georgia Bread & Wine Discovery Tour

September 28-October 6, 2026

Georgia. Small but mighty. A feisty wild alive and beautiful country of bread and wine, walnut, blue fenugreek and cheese. Of big-hearted, generous and proud people who hold and live their long traditions. Where the mighty mountains of the Greater Caucasus, scattered with ancient monasteries and stone villages, tumble down through vineyards where wine has been made for 8000 years to the fertile humid plains hemming the Black Sea. Georgia contains a thousand contrasts. The weight of a long and tumultuous history. The rollicking streets of Tbilsi, with its layers of Persian, Arab, Ottoman and Russian rule. Where young -gun natural winemakers host pop up bars in abandoned soviet warehouses, fermenting their grapes the traditional way in underground clay amphora, next door to shops where bakers roll out the khachapuri dough on the same bench their great grandfather did.  We want to show you Georgia from the inside. It’s enduring heart. It’s not a place you can just walk into and get under the skin of.

.We travel slowly, eating and drinking with intention.

About Us

Boris is a lifelong food fanatic. Food and wine are the languages he uses to create stories for people to inhabit together, to find joy and solace, community and culture with. He cut his chef teeth in Basque county , Spain and California , honing his craft in Michelin starred restaurants before tiring of the rarefied high pressure atmosphere of fine dining and moving to Melbourne, Australia in 2013 and founded his cult neighbourhood Melbourne bakery All are Welcome, followed by Georgian wine bar Grey and Grey in the old lawyer’s office next door. Boris has spent the last 20 years falling in love with Georgia, eating and drinking his way into village life, making many friends, and collecting the previously unrecorded family recipes, passed down hand to hand for generations, that make up his forthcoming cookbook. He has a backyard of bee hives and a shed full of drying cheese and persimmons in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, his own vineyard in Georgia and cooks the best offal you could ever hope to eat.


Martin Martini is the native mushroom king of Australia. Coming from a gloriously patchwork background in art, music, theatre, foraging and food Martin follows a thread of polyphonic creativity and magic through the world. Insatiably curious and driven to share the gold he finds in whatever way he can,
he started his mushroom meander business Belly of the World mushrooms in 2019 at a time noone was eating anything except pine mushrooms and slippery jacks. He is well recognised as the initiator of a growing appreciation of the huge number of previously unidentified edible Australian mushrooms. Martin runs mushroom exploration walks all over Australia and internationally and is renowned for his learned but totally untamed, slanted art- centred approach. His short films and t shirts are as famous as his banter. If you see someone harvesting parasol mushrooms in a local field or boletes in a forest, chances are they learnt that from Martin. He has created foraged mushroom pop ups at some of the countries leading restaurants, putting native morels, chanterelles and cordyceps onto menus and plates for the first time. To Martin, mushrooms are another way to inhabit life and the world fully and with passion and wonder, getting waylaid all along the way.

THE APPROACH

This is not a comprehensive survey of Georgian cuisine.

It is a personal passage through it.

We visit winemakers, bakers, cooks, and farmers whose work is inseparable from their daily lives. We enter homes, cellars, forests, and kitchens not as spectators, but as guests.

Much of what we experience cannot be scheduled precisely.

It depends on weather.
On harvest.
On who is home.

We enter the rhythm of the place.

Join us.

Group size: Limited to 10 people

ACCOMMODATION

Accommodation is in comfortable hotels with private bathrooms selected for their character, comfort, and proximity to the people we visit.

INCLUDED

Accommodation
Transport within Georgia
Airport transfers
Meals
Workshops and tastings
Wine with meals

NOT INCLUDED

International flights
Travel insurance
Personal expenses

PRICE

$7,950 AUD per person

Based on shared accommodation.

Single supplement available.

Deposit required to secure place.

Day 1 — Tbilisi, city of many histories.

Arrive and settle in.

Dinner with Lotus Eaters winemakers, the future of Georgian wine, radical, traditional, magic.

Sleep: Hotel Makmani, heart of  the old city

Day 2 — Beech forest foraging on top of the Ancient Capital

Out to the beech forests of glorious Tianeti past the ancient capital of Georgia, Mtskheta, to hunt wild mushrooms and picnic lunch before heading on to renowned wine-region Kakheti for jaw-dropping traditional qveri wine and  food with the winemaker of Lapati Wines.

Sleep: Hotel Makmani, Tbilisi

Day 3 — Eat eat on the high plateau

We travel to the high plateau of Javakheti, a stark and beautiful landscape. Lunch in Dukhobors village, home to a Russian spiritual community exiled here in the 19th century, where food is shaped by memory as much as place. Convivial dinner at a local home in Nishgori village.

Sleep: Valodia’s Guesthouse in the Meskheti valley.

Day 4 — God and Cheese

Visit the miraculous 12th century cave monastery carved into the cliff face at Vardzia on the old silk road. Then wake up  your hands and heart to  cook our lunch in a village kitchen home and learn how to make the local Tenili cheese, a process that exists almost entirely outside written recipes. We sit and eat.

Sleep: Valodia’s Guesthousew

Day 5 — Bread and Wine

We make the long drive west. Bread is the centre of every Georgian meal. Without bread there is nothing. We immerse ourselves in grain and fire with a heritage wheat farmer, the warmth of the hearth where the bread is baked like it has been for centuries, a hearty communal lunch. Soil to table.

Later,it’s deep wine visiting the cellar of a Kutaisi winemaker whose wines sing of wonderful limestone soils.

Sleep: Memoire Hotel, Kutaisi

Day 6 — All the world is green

We head for the fertile western plains; peaches, pomegranates, herbs and berries. Another facet of Georgia’s prolific table.

Via the decaying sanatoriums of Tskaltubo, macabrely gorgeous relics of Soviet-era health tourism to a dinner fragrant with this different landscape and its produce, at the home of Beso, full family style.

Sleep: Casa de Khasia Guesthouse, Zugdidi

Day 7 — Market and Kitchen

Wake up and discover Zugdidi’s central market, heaving with incredible produce, then spend the day immersed in Megrelian food culture, eating cooking laughing and telling stories with a passionate proponent of these ancient traditions.

Sleep: Casa de Khasia Guesthouse, Zugdidi

Day 8 — Tea and wild chanterelles

Tea fields and tastings in Guria , maybe more mushrooms and definitely more wonderful wine.

Sleep: Menabde Winery

Day 9 — Return to Tbilisi

Back to the beginning, But changed. Full. We share our last incredible dinner. Drink it in. See you next time.

Sleep: Hotel 20 Rooms