Three days in Kakheti: wine buried in the ground, and lunch that runs to four hours

Walk the wall first. King Erekle II had it built in 1762 to shelter the surrounding villages from raids out of the east, and it is one of the longest fortifications in the country: four and a half kilometres of it, twenty three towers, six gates, each tower named for the village it protected. Sections have been restored so you can climb the stairs and walk the parapet, and the view north over the vineyards to the mountains is the reason people come to Sighnaghi at all.

Then the museum on the main street, which is small, modern and much better than it needs to be. Downstairs is the archaeology of the valley; upstairs are sixteen original paintings by Niko Pirosmani, who was born in a village an hour from here, painted signboards and oilcloths for restaurants in exchange for food and drink, died destitute in a Tbilisi cellar in 1918 and is now on the money.

In the evening go to Pheasant's Tears, the winery on the lane below the square that did more than anybody to persuade the outside world that qvevri wine was worth drinking. The tasting runs through half a dozen of them, amber and red, and the kitchen cooks specifically to go with them.

This is the long day and it needs a driver. The road runs northwest along the valley through Gurjaani and the vineyards to Tsinandali, about an hour away, where Prince Alexander Chavchavadze built a house in the 1830s. He was a poet, a general in the Russian army, godson of Catherine the Great and the man who introduced European winemaking to Georgia; the cellar under the house was bottling to French practice by the 1880s, when everybody else in the country was still selling wine out of a qvevri by the jug. The house is a museum, the garden is an English-style park of nineteenth century imported trees, and the tasting room downstairs holds bottles going back to the 1840s.

Telavi, twenty minutes further, is the region's capital and worth an hour rather than an afternoon. The reason to stop is the palace of Erekle II, who ruled Kakheti from 1744 and spent his reign playing Persia and Russia against each other with mixed success. The palace is small, low and unmistakably Persian in its arches and tilework, and there is a fortified wall, a royal bathhouse and a chapel inside the same compound.

Finish at Alaverdi, twenty kilometres out into the plain. The cathedral was built in the eleventh century and stands fifty metres high, the second tallest church in Georgia, alone inside a monastery wall with vines on every side and the mountains directly behind. There is nothing else near it, which is exactly the effect. The monastery goes back to the sixth century, its buried cellar has been restored and is open, and the monks sell what they make.

Bodbe is twenty minutes on foot from the edge of Sighnaghi, or two minutes by taxi, along an avenue of cypresses. St Nino, the Cappadocian woman who converted Georgia in the fourth century, died here and is buried under the small chapel to the right of the iconostasis; the convent around her grave is one of the most important pilgrimage sites in the country and is busy with Georgians rather than with foreigners. The terrace behind the church looks straight down the valley.

From the bottom of the convent garden a steep path drops into the gorge to the spring where Nino is said to have baptised converts. It is about twenty minutes down and a good deal longer back up. There is a bathhouse at the bottom run by a nun, and people do go in; it involves a rented white tunic and a queue, and the water is cold enough to make the point.

Then back up for the marshrutka, with whatever you bought yesterday wrapped in a jumper.