Tbilisi, Georgia, is a city that has experienced its fair share of turbulence over the years, most recently when Russian forces bombed a small part of the city in 2008. Post Soviet recovery hasn’t always been easy, but today the city is thriving due to the return of the Diaspora Georgians and business laws that make entrepreneurship quite easy.
Tbilisi is in an exciting state of revival thanks to people like Zura Natroshvili, a doctor and adamant wine lover. Creating restaurants and cafes in people’s homes is a new trend in Tbilisi. They can range in size from small and intimate, to quite large and some even with the capacity to make wine. A homey feeling is created with the use of antique dishes and silverware, and the pride Georgians have in their famous level of hospitality.
Bina n37, a rooftop restaurant and winery in the Vedzisi neighborhood, that also happens to be Natroshvili’s home, is one of the most successful and unique of this trend. Natroshvili started making wine in 2015 with a crazy idea and a dream. Though the nature of what makes up Georgian identity can be argued for days, something everyone agrees on is wine is an 8,000-year-old tradition that links Georgians from their past to the present. Returning from abroad and inspired by the popularity of the natural wine movement, Natroshvili realized producing wine was his future.
He already owned a two-story penthouse apartment, so he decided to convert one floor into a restaurant and winery despite not having a proper marani–a traditional Georgian wine cellar where terracotta qvevri (ceramic jars) are buried in the earth and used for wine production. Natroshvili converted a pool he was building for his son into a marani in the sky. Instead of filling the pool with water, he brought the earth to the eighth floor. Here, he makes wine with grapes trucked in from Kakheti. It’s wine made the traditional Georgian way, with a twist–in qvevri that are buried in the earth…in a pool above ground.
It may be the craziest urban winery in the world, let alone Georgia. The first time I visited I asked Natroshvili if he was out of his mind. HIs reply was just a laugh. The urban winery is now the setting for one of Tbilisi’s most exciting restaurants. He has created not only a space for winemaking, but also a restaurant with traditional bread ovens and a kitchen staff who create traditional and seasonal Georgian dishes you’d typically only try in a home. They have 43 qvevri at the moment, and they make 10 different kinds of wine. There are indoor and outdoor spaces with the capacity to fit 150 people. Despite holding what seems like a large number, the restaurant evokes the feeling of being a guest in a home. There’s often traditional Georgian music, too. It seems Natroshvili has found his rightful place in Tbilisi, as a quintessential Georgian host who makes everyone feel special and at home. After all, he reminds me, Georgians believe “a guest is a gift from God.” Indeed.
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