Traditional Georgian Drinks and Where to Order Them in Tbilisi

Georgian drinking runs on the clock as much as the menu: kompot or a cold lager at lunch, wine and toasts at dinner, chacha to close the night. Here's what each drink is and when it turns up.

Georgia's tourism administration dates its winemaking back about 8,000 years, and it still turns on the qvevri, an egg-shaped clay vessel buried in the ground. UNESCO listed the qvevri method as intangible heritage in 2013, and at a supra the wine comes with toasts, with the tamada deciding when you drink.

Start with amber wine: white grapes left on their skins until the wine turns gold to tea-coloured and a little grippy. Beyond that, Georgian wine is a question of grape and region, with Saperavi (red) and Rkatsiteli (white) the names you'll meet first. Tbilisi's wine bars pour all 3 colours by the glass, so you can go from white through amber to red in one evening.

Chacha is distilled from grape pomace, the skins and pips left over once the wine is made, and it's the spirit that closes a supra. Georgia registered it as geographical indication No. 1 in 2011, and the rules say the bottled drink has to be at least 40%.

You'll meet it as a toast at the table, as a tasting set at a bar that treats it like wine, or in a cocktail. A cellar wine tasting often pours a glass alongside the wines, and a round of shots is how a night out in Tbilisi turns into a late one.

Georgian beer runs from supermarket lager to sours in Tbilisi taprooms. Natakhtari and Zedazeni, both 5%, are the big lagers, and Argo Lager (4.8%) is brewed inside Tbilisi itself.

A cold lager is the classic partner for khinkali, and a pub on Baratashvili Street sells itself on ice-cold draft beer as much as on its khinkali. For sours, Megobrebi brewery runs its own taproom in old Tbilisi, where one reviewer's pick was a tomato beer.

The traditional one is highland beer, registered as an appellation in 2025: barley beer from Tusheti and Pshav-Khevsureti, 4.7 to 5.5%, brewed for religious holidays. The Tush version, aludi, is boiled in copper cauldrons and poured in village squares in summer, not in Tbilisi bars.

Lagidze water is a measure of flavoured syrup topped with soda water. Mitrofan Lagidze created it in Kutaisi in 1887, opened his first Tbilisi shop on what's now Rustaveli Avenue in 1906, and it's on Georgia's national list of intangible cultural heritage.

Order cream for the oddest one, since the company's cream syrup is made with milk and eggs, or tarragon or pear for something closer to soda. The old pairing is a glass with a cheese khachapuri, and one reviewer singles out exactly that pair at a shawarma counter.

Tarkhuna, Georgian for tarragon, is the green soda that Natakhtari, Zedazeni and Kazbegi bottle, and Zedazeni's own product page lists colourings in it, so the green isn't all herb. Homemade lemonade is a different drink again, with mint and berry among the flavours reviewers name, and a lemonade cost one reviewer 8 GEL at a cafe.

Kompot is fruit stewed in water with sugar and served cold, and at Georgian restaurants it's the jug that turns up for anyone not drinking. It's sweet and still, which is the point next to salty cheese bread and fried chebureki, and reviews spell it both ways.

Borjomi is the famous one, and Nabeghlavi and Sairme are the other 2 mineral waters on Tbilisi menus. Borjomi says its water rises from 8,000 m under the Lesser Caucasus, comes out at 37 to 41 C and picks up more than 60 minerals on the way, and it's been bottled for more than a century.

Georgia grows its own tea in the west: Prince Mamia V Gurieli took it up as early as 1809 and planted the first bushes, and tea brought to Georgia by the Chinese merchant Lao Jin Zhao, who later lived in Chakvi, won a gold medal in Paris in 1900. After growing most of the Soviet Union's tea and collapsing in the 1990s, Georgian tea is coming back under a state programme started in 2016.

In town, one specialty cafe lists Georgian tea and herbal tea next to its coffee. Coffee is Turkish-style or specialty, from coffee brewed on hot sand at a tiny waffle cafe to single-origin roasts at the city's roasters.

Tbilisi prices swing more with the place than the drink: a beer is 3 GEL at a local restaurant and 20 GEL for a small 0.33 L beer on a rooftop. Every figure below comes from reviews, not menus, so read them as a range.

Georgian food is salty, rich and heavy on cheese, walnuts and grilled meat, so the drink's job is to cut through it. Lager goes with khinkali, cream Lagidze or kompot with cheese bread, a dry Saperavi with mtsvadi, and amber wine with walnut dishes like pkhali.