Reserve a harvest trip in Kakheti for the rtveli, mid September to mid October

To reserve a harvest trip in Kakheti is to book a set of dates that belong to the fruit rather than to you. Rtveli is the word for the picking, and in the eastern Georgian valleys it is not staged for visitors: for about four weeks every household with rows behind the house stops doing whatever it normally does, and the grapes come off before the weather turns them. What Roving Hours holds is nine nights inside that stretch, from $4,109 per person on two sharing, with your hands in the work rather than at the edge of it.

The window opens on the flat ground and closes on the slopes. Rkatsiteli and Mtsvane, the white varieties that fill most of what is planted around Telavi, reach their sugar first, generally in the week of September 15. Saperavi, the black grape behind everything red in this district, hangs on three to four weeks longer, and the last of it leaves the terraces above 700 meters somewhere between October 12 and October 20. Take the front of the window and you cut white fruit in shirtsleeves with the valley at 78F in the afternoon. Take the back of it and you cut black fruit in a jacket, with the first snow of the year showing on the range to the north.

Work begins at first light because fruit that heats up in the crate has already started working on itself by the time it reaches the yard. You are between the rows by about 06:50 with dew heavy enough to soak you to the thigh, the loads go down to the marani through the middle of the day, and the crushing and the filling of the vessels run on until the weighing finishes in the late afternoon. That accounts for most of the daylight, and it is what the mark on the card below stands for.

From the shears to the sealed vessel

A household in this valley works two to five hectares, which is five to twelve acres, and it cannot get that off the vine alone. That is the entire reason two strangers with two pairs of hands are wanted here and are put to work about ten minutes after arriving. The vines are trained low, so you cut kneeling or bent, into a crate that runs near 18 kilos when it is full and then has to be carried out to the track. Nobody counts what you bring in. Somebody will, once and without a word about it, point out the second smaller bunch you left hidden behind a leaf.

Fruit goes into a satsnakheli, a press hollowed out of a single trunk, and is worked with bare feet. There are electric crushers in the district and two of the households on this itinerary own one, but through the picking weeks the log gets used, because it washes out faster and because the whole yard can stand around it. Juice, skins, stalks and pips run down together into a qvevri, a clay vessel of anywhere between 300 and 2,000 liters set to its neck in the floor of the marani, where the ground holds the ferment near 14C whatever the yard outside is doing. The lid goes on with clay and river sand and stays there into the spring.

By the second afternoon somebody in the house will be boiling juice down with flour into a thick brown paste and dipping strings of shelled walnuts through it, six or seven passes each, then hanging them in a doorway to skin over for a fortnight. What the press leaves behind is kept for distilling in November, long after you have flown home. Nothing you touch across the nine days belongs to Roving Hours Bookings LLC: not the rooms, not the van, not the log, not the vessel in the floor.

The valley floor, the wall above it, and the light going

Telavi stands at about 550 meters on the southern shoulder of the Gombori range and looks north over 30 to 40 kilometers of near continuous vineyard on the Alazani floor. The main Caucasus wall closes that view at more than 3,000 meters and takes its first real snow in the second half of October, which is the plainest signal in the valley that the picking is nearly finished. On September 18 the sun comes up at 06:45 and goes down at 18:59. By October 15 it is 07:15 and 18:13. The working day sheds about three quarters of an hour a week across the window, and on the last dates the final crate goes in under a low orange light with the temperature dropping as it does.

Afternoons run near 78F in the third week of September and near 68F in the middle of October, with 52F before breakfast and the rows wet until eight. The road in from the capital crosses the Gombori Pass at about 1,620 meters, takes a little over two hours and is open throughout this window; snow shuts it, but snow on that pass is a January matter. Two of the villages on this itinerary have one shop apiece, and each shuts when the family who keep it go out to their own rows. The eleventh century cathedral north of Telavi closes to visitors during services, which do not run to a timetable you can plan around, and the district museum is shut on Mondays.

What two days of rain does to a picking week

The harvest itself is dependable in a way that very little else sold here is, because fruit that has reached its sugar has to come off the vine whatever the sky does. What moves is the date, not the event. Rain is the one thing that stops the rows outright: a wet spell of two days is ordinary in early October, and if one lands inside your nine nights you will spend it under the marani roof on vessels, lids and the pressing that has backed up. That is real work, but it is not the work you came for. Weather is underwritten by nobody, the figure does not fall because it rained on you, and the lost day is not made up at the far end.

The other honest thing to say concerns language. In two of the four houses there is nobody under sixty at home during the day, and no English at all is spoken between the rows. The guide is from the district and stays with the group for all nine days, so you are never left standing in a yard wondering what is happening, but a good part of every afternoon runs on gesture, and the evening table goes long whether or not you can follow what is being said across it.

Nine nights, and who sends the bill

Roving Hours reserves the nine nights of rooms, the four cutting days and two marani days with the host households, the van and driver inside Kakheti, and the road transfer from the capital and back. It reserves nothing at all about your flight: that one is yours to buy, no air ticket is sold at this office, and no seat is inside the figure above. The company that actually runs those days sends its invoice straight to you, in its own name and on its own terms, and this office collects nothing from you at any stage, in any form.

Pricing one exact pair of dates needs two to four working days here, because the households have to be asked before a figure goes out and during rtveli nobody answers a telephone until after dark. Tell us which end of the window you want, how far your dates can move if the fruit comes early, and whether you would rather be in the white or the black. What comes back is an itemized figure with the nights, the cutting days, the marani days and the transfers listed separately, so you can see what each part of the nine days costs.

Roving Hours Bookings LLC works from 1350 N. Orange Avenue, Suite 221 in Orlando, FL 32789, which is Orange, Florida. Send your dates to bookings@rovinghours.com, or reach an agent on +1 (407) 629-3157 if you would rather talk the window through out loud. Anything on this page that has gone stale should go to corrections@rovinghours.com, and it will be checked against the operating company before a word of it is changed.