There is a particular quality to the light in Signagi around five in the afternoon — golden, almost amber, as though the valley below has been soaking in eight thousand years of fermentation and the air itself has taken on color. We arrived by marshrutka from Tbilisi, grinding up the switchbacks above Kakheti, and the moment the town’s medieval walls came into view I understood why Georgians call this place the city of love. It has nothing to do with romance and everything to do with the way it makes you feel immediately, irrationally attached to something.
Inside the Walls
The fortified perimeter of Signagi stretches nearly four kilometers, punctuated by twenty-three towers, and you can walk most of it without encountering a single other tourist if you go early enough. The cobblestones on Chavchavadze Street are uneven and polished smooth by centuries of foot traffic. Wooden balconies jut over the narrow lanes, draped in late-season vines, their leaves already turning a bruised crimson in October. I stopped at the overlook near the Bodbe Monastery road and stood there long enough that Lia eventually wandered back to find me. The Alazani plain below looked like a rumpled green cloth laid out toward the Greater Caucasus, the snow-capped peaks floating in the haze like something conjured.
What the Wine Actually Tastes Like
Every guesthouse in Signagi has a cellar. This is not a metaphor. The family that hosted us — a woman named Manana, short and precise in her movements — led us down concrete steps within an hour of our arrival and opened a clay qvevri that had been sealed since the previous autumn. The amber wine that came out smelled of dried apricot and wet stone and something faintly tannic I couldn’t name. She poured it into ceramic cups without ceremony, the way you’d offer water. We ate churchkhela, the walnut-and-grape-must candles that hang in every market stall, and a dish of badrijani nigvzit — fried eggplant rolled around walnut paste — while the wine did its slow, serious work.
The unexpected thing: I had expected the famous wine registry office, where couples can get married any hour of the day, to feel kitschy. Instead, at dusk, with the valley going violet and a Georgian polyphonic choir rehearsing somewhere above the main square, it felt like the most serious place I’d been in weeks.
The Monastery Below the Town
Three kilometers south of the walls, Bodbe Monastery sits in a stand of cypress and pine, enclosing the tomb of Saint Nino, the woman who brought Christianity to Georgia in the fourth century. The nuns there tend rose gardens with the focused attention of people who believe every task is a form of prayer. I lit a candle inside the dim basilica and stood in the incense-thick air, listening to distant bells, and felt — as I so rarely do — that I was in exactly the right place.
When to go: September through early November is the Kakheti harvest season — the rtveli — when every family is pressing grapes and the air smells of must from dawn until dark. Spring, particularly late April and May, offers wildflower-covered hillsides and fewer visitors than the summer peak.