My wife and I were somewhere in the grass with a bottle of Georgian wine when I realized my monkey mind had finally shut off.

That's what happens when you earn your way in: no road, no shuttle, no shortcut. You leave the car in the village and hike uphill for about thirty minutes, or you negotiate with someone for a horse.

Nobody stumbles in here accidentally.

The lodge sits at roughly 2,300 meters in the Juta Valley, framed by a jagged massif locals call the Georgian Dolomites. A man named Gela built it by hand and opened it in 2015.

Before that, the valley was a footnote in hiking guidebooks. After, it became one of the most-photographed destinations in Georgia and helped spark an entire hiking economy in the region.

The rooms are simple and compact, which is exactly right for this altitude. What lifts them is a floor-to-ceiling glass wall facing the mountains. You wake up inside that view every morning.

The Georgian wine is worth its own mention: local, natural, and very cheap. Georgian wine is made by different techniques than most Western wines. The Georgians, wild that they are, basically throw the entire wine plant into a clay pot and leave it. Instead of trying to control the process with added yeast and sulfites, they just let nature do its work. Georgians claim they've been making wine like this for over 8,000 years, making them the oldest wine-making region in the world.

What I can claim through my personal experience is that even after drinking multiple bottles of this wine in a single night, I never had a hangover. And the best stuff is 5-15 euros a bottle. The most expensive bottle in one of my favorite wine shops in Tbilisi was literally Soviet wine, over 60 years old; and it was about €70.

But I digress...

Breakfast at this lodge is a complimentary buffet of Georgian bread, cheese, butter, and jam. The restaurant draws in day-hikers all through the day, and by evening someone's usually found the chacha.

A loop trail from the lodge runs three kilometers into the valley to a waterfall and an alpine lake. For bigger ambitions, there's a 3,341-meter pass crossing into the neighboring region, one of the great Caucasus treks.

We did the easy loop, came back, ate too much at dinner, and drank more wine under the peaks until it was too cold to sit outside.

This lodge is Fifth Season, and it's above Juta village in the Kazbegi region of Georgia, roughly 150 km from Tbilisi.

Getting there from the capital is its own adventure: rent a car, or take a minibus to Stepantsminda then a 4x4 taxi to Juta. With how I've seen Georgian bus drivers tackle these roads, I'd rent a car 10 times out of 10. The lodge is a 20-30 minute uphill hike from the village, or you can arrange a horse (60 GEL one-way).

Rooms run roughly $83-200 USD per night - peak season is much pricier. Breakfast is included. Best visited June through September.

A place you have to work to reach stays with you differently. I find myself recommending this valley to everyone heading to Georgia, not just the hotel at the top of it.

Hit reply if you've been somewhere that made you slow down.