Prometheus Wine Museum

Located at the exit of Prometheus Cave in Kumistavi, the Prometheus Wine Museum offers guided tours showcasing Georgia’s ancient winemaking traditions, featuring unique artifacts and wine tasting experiences.

Planning your visit

Georgia has a serious claim to be the birthplace of wine — archaeological evidence of grape fermentation in the South Caucasus runs back some 8,000 years, and the qvevri method, fermenting and ageing in large clay vessels buried in the ground, is on the UNESCO intangible heritage list and still in use. The Prometheus Wine Museum sets out that tradition, with artefacts, traditional equipment and explanation of how qvevri winemaking works and why it produces amber wines from white grapes.

Tastings are part of the visit, and the local Imeretian varieties are unfamiliar to most visitors — Georgia has several hundred indigenous grapes, very few of which are grown anywhere else.

The location is the draw as much as the wine. It sits at the exit of Prometheus Cave, one of the largest and most heavily formatted show caves in the region, with a walking route through chambers of stalactites and an underground river boat trip at the end. The two are visited in sequence, which is why the museum is placed there.

Kumistavi is near Kutaisi in western Georgia. Bookable options are guided wine museum tours at the cave exit, generally as part of a wider Imereti day. Current availability is shown below.