Georgian Cheese: Types, Dishes and Where to Try Them in Tbilisi

Cheese in Georgia is a staple rather than a course, and Georgia's official tourism site counts around 60 kinds, from imeruli and sulguni to chogi, kobi and kazla. It calls cheese a fundamental part of the everyday menu, on every table.

In Georgian food it does 3 jobs: it's the filling in khachapuri, a plate of its own with bread from breakfast onwards, and an ingredient melted into cornmeal, rolled round mint or baked over mushrooms. Learn 2 names, sulguni and imeruli, and you can read most of a menu.

Sulguni is the stretchy one. The Mingrelians and Svans made it first, from cow or buffalo milk: the curd is kneaded, cut into strips, worked in hot water and pulled into balls, which is why it peels into layers cold and runs into strings hot.

Smoked sulguni is the same cheese hung under a high beam in Samegrelo with smoke blown onto it for at least 2 months. It's the one to order with wine, and one reviewer at a Tbilisi wine bar recommends it with honey.

Imeruli, from Imereti, is the fresh one: the curd is shaped into balls by hand, salted with rock salt and kept in brine, so it's soft, crumbly and salty rather than stretchy. It fills the Imeretian khachapuri, which the tourism board calls the most widespread of the types of khachapuri.

Detail	Sulguni	Imeruli
From	Samegrelo and Svaneti	Imereti
Made	Curd worked in hot water and pulled into balls	Curd pressed into balls by hand, salted with rock salt
Texture	Layered, stretchy when hot	Soft and crumbly
Kept in	Salt water, sometimes with matsoni, or smoked	Brine
In khachapuri	Megrelian, with fresh chkinti, and on top	Imeretian, on its own

The everyday cheeses are eaten fresh, while the mountain ones are made to keep, each aged for months in its own container. You'll meet them less often, so when a menu names one, order it.

Cheese	From	How it's made	Aged
Guda	Tusheti	Sheep's milk, sometimes with cow's, salted into a sheepskin bag	60 days
Tenili	Meskheti	Curd pulled into strings, rolled in cream, packed into a clay pot set over ash	At least 2 months
Dambalkhacho	Tianeti and Pshavi	Curd balls dried in a basket, rinsed in whey, packed into clay vessels	1.5 to 2 months
Narchvi	Svaneti	Cow's milk cheese made in August, pressed into a wooden box	Until Christmas

Dambalkhacho is the one to be ready for. It's mouldy on the outside and golden inside by design, and the tourism board calls the flavour intense and spicy; in the mountains it's heated in a pan with plenty of clarified butter, a dish called khachoerbo. Tenili looks least like cheese, a nest of fine white strings, and it goes into salads.

Cheese is on a Georgian menu far more often than it gets its own heading. Sulguni is in most of these dishes, because it melts and stretches.

Dish	Cheese	What arrives
Imeretian khachapuri	Imeruli	Round bread with the cheese sealed inside
Megrelian khachapuri	Chkinti and sulguni	The same, with cheese baked on top
Mushrooms with sulguni	Sulguni	Mushrooms baked with cheese in a clay ketsi
Elarji	Sulguni	Stretchy cornmeal and cheese from Samegrelo
Gebzhalia	Sulguni	Sulguni rolls with mint in a matsoni sauce
Tashmijabi	Sulguni	A Svan mash of potato and cheese
Khachoerbo	Dambalkhacho	The mouldy mountain cheese melted in clarified butter

Khachapuri is filling, so for 2 people the move is 1 khachapuri and 1 hot cheese dish. Gobi and Pasanauri, below, are both on our khachapuri list, so the bread and the cheese dish can come from the same kitchen.

A Georgian cheese board is a normal thing to order with wine. The tourism board describes one as imeruli, sulguni, smoked sulguni and curd wrapped in sulguni slices, and it wants a torn loaf of shotis puri next to it.

At a wine tasting, cheese often comes with the glasses; at a wine bar it's a board you order. The tourism board pairs dambalkhacho with rkatsiteli, the white grape behind a lot of amber wine, so try guda or smoked sulguni the same way.

Georgian cheese carries 2 different kinds of official status. The first is a protected name: the National Intellectual Property Center of Georgia lists 13 cheese names among the Georgian indications protected abroad, nearly all of them in the EU, Switzerland, the UK and Moldova.

The second is heritage status for the way a cheese is made. The tourism board says tenili's method has been on Georgia's list of intangible cultural heritage monuments since 2013, and dambalkhacho is on the same list.

Cheese	Protected name abroad	Heritage monument in Georgia
Sulguni	Sulguni, Megrelian Sulguni and Svanetian Sulguni	Not on record
Imeruli	Imeretian Cheese	Not on record
Guda	Tushetian Guda, plus Guda in Switzerland and Moldova	Not on record
Dambalkhacho	Dambalkhacho	Yes
Tenili	Tenili	Yes, since 2013
Chechili	Meskhetian Chechili	Not on record
Kobi, chogi and Adjarian clechili	All 3, plus the plain name Georgian Cheese	Not on record
Narchvi	Not on the list	Not on record

Tbilisi's annual cheese festival is in early June at Mtatsminda Park, where the agriculture ministry counted 45 cheese producers in 2023. It's the cheese date on the food festival calendar, and Tbilisoba in October brings cheeses from every part of the country to Rike Park.

Cheese is also sold at the city's markets and in supermarkets, but buy it to eat here. Churchkhela and spices are the edible souvenirs that travel.