An international research team says it has found the world‘s oldest winery in a paper published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed Journal of Archaeological Science.
“It’s the oldest proven case of documented and dedicated wine production, stretching back the horizons of this important development by thousands of years,” said Gregory Areshian, co-director of the excavation and assistant director of the University of California Los Angeles‘s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.
Areshian says that clay pots and vats discovered at a sprawling cave system in southern Armenia near the border with Iran shows signs of an organized effort to press and distill grapes during the Copper Age, about 6,000 years ago.
The press and wide shallow vat are similar to foot-stomping type equipment used by people throughout the region even up into the 19th century.
The wine might have tasted similar to modern vintages as well. Botanists examining the find say it was the species Vitis vinifera, the same one used to produce the vast majority of wine today.
Areshian says the wine would be comparable to a modern unfiltered red wine, and may have had a similar taste to a merlot. He says that he would like to make a recreation of the whole press and assembly to make wine using local heritage grape varietals, just to sample it and see what challenges the Bronze-age vintners may have faced.
Before this find, Areshian says, the oldest known winery was in Israel, and dated to 1650 BC.
It fits with the first evidence of grape domestication a thousand years earlier, and the later widespread wine distribution and consumption across the Caucasus and Mediterranean.
“This find shows that there was a high degree of agriculture and horticultural skill even back in 4,000 BC,” says Areshian. “Producing this wine would have been high technology of the time incorporating detailed knowledge of watering cycles, pruning the vines, how to deal with pests and the fermentation process itself, which is more complex than brewing beer.”
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