Gadachrili Gora

Gadachrili Gora is the Neolithic village mound near Imiri whose jar fragments carry Georgia's 8,000-year-old wine evidence. A 2017 PNAS paper calls the residues from here and nearby Shulaveris Gora the earliest biomolecular archaeological evidence for grape wine from the Near East, about 6,000–5,800 BC. Go for the place itself: a stream-cut hill in farmland, not a winery, with no tasting and no museum open yet.

Expect a hill split in two by the seasonal Shulaveris Ghele stream. The cut exposes 4–5 m of building layers in the middle of the mound, and a mudbrick building near the centre keeps its dome to about 1 m high. The excavated area has been conserved. Later, Early Bronze Age people of the Kura–Araxes culture dug tombs into the mound.

Go on a dry day in daylight: the mound is open ground with no published opening hours, in semiarid steppe that gets 350–550 mm of rain a year. The excavation team works here in early summer; its 2027 field season runs from 24 May to 17 July. If the day includes the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi, avoid Mondays: it opens Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00–18:00.

There is no ticket office, entry fee, opening hours or visitor centre at the mound. OpenStreetMap marks access as by permit, so ask in Imiri or go with a local guide before walking onto the hill. A site museum is planned but not open. For the finds, the Simon Janashia Museum of Georgia charges 40 GEL for foreign adults and 20 GEL for Georgian citizens; last entry is 17:30.

The mound lies beside the Marneuli–Sadakhlo road at Imiri, 9 km south of Marneuli town and roughly 50 km south of Tbilisi. The drive from Tbilisi to Marneuli takes about an hour; continue south by car to Imiri and use the coordinates 41.3904, 44.8210. Shulaveris Gora, the sister site, lies within 2 km, near Shulaveri village.

Gadachrili Gora (გადაჭრილი გორა) is a Neolithic settlement mound near the village of Imiri in Marneuli municipality, Kvemo Kartli, roughly 50 km south of Tbilisi. Farmers of the Shulaveri-Shomu culture lived here in round buildings between about 5920 and 5720 BC. It is an archaeological site under study, not a winery, and it lies outside Kakheti, the wine region east of Tbilisi.

The evidence came from jars. Excavations renewed in 2012–2013 and 2015–2016, part of a National Wine Agency project launched in 2014, dated the samples to the first half of the sixth millennium BC. A team led by Patrick McGovern of the Penn Museum, with the Georgian National Museum and the University of Toronto, found tartaric, malic, succinic and citric acid in five jar bases from Gadachrili and three from Shulaveris Gora.

Grape pollen is abundant in the Neolithic layers here and absent from today's topsoil, while the nearest vines now grow several kilometres away. The excavators read this as vines growing close to the village, possibly inside it, with the fruit eaten as food. Whether those grapes were wild or domesticated is not yet clear, and no Neolithic grape pip has been dated from a site of this culture.

The paper's own wording is careful. It puts these jars half a millennium before those of Hajji Firuz Tepe in Iran, yet says no region can be given priority until more excavation and DNA work on wild vines is done. The same soils hold bread wheat too: charred grains from Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora underpin a 2026 PNAS study led from the Georgian National Museum.