Areni-1 cave - world's oldest winery (6,100 years old)

Areni-1 cave - world's oldest winery (6,100 years old)

In 2007, archaeologist Boris Gasparyan dug into the first gallery of a cave behind a village restaurant and found a 1-metre clay basin still coated with the pigment of red wine — pressed there in 4100 BC. Inside the same cave: the world's oldest leather shoe (5,500 years old, size EU 37, stuffed with grass), and three ceramic pots containing the plastered skulls of young women. The same people making wine here were performing burial rites here. Production facility and sacred space at once. The grape seeds found alongside the press are genetically identical to the Areni Noir vines still growing in this valley. You can drink that grape 50 metres from where it was first fermented, at a tasting room that opened next to the cave entrance in 2024.