The oldest winery in the world is the Areni-1 Cave in Armenia

The cave is colder than the valley outside, and darker, and it smells of wet stone and centuries. I have now had the pleasure of ducking through the low mouth of Areni-1 twice, first in October 2024 and again in May 2026: a cave cut into a cliff above the Arpa River in southern Armenia, where a few steps in, both times, the guide stopped and pointed at the floor. A shallow clay basin, sunk into the rock. Around six thousand years ago someone stood on that exact spot, tipped in a basket of grapes, and trod them into juice with their bare feet. This is the oldest winery on earth. And almost nobody outside Armenia knows it is here.

I have stood in a lot of cellars. None of them rearranged my sense of how old this craft really is the way ten steps into a dark cave in Vayots Dzor did. So, let me walk you in properly, from the mouth of the cave to the vat at the back, and then settle the argument that follows Armenia everywhere: oldest winery, or oldest wine?

Ten steps into a cave above the Arpa River

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1. Me at the foot of the cliff on the approach, for scale against the red rocks that hide Areni-1.
2. The red rock gorge of the Arpa River, seen from the mouth of the cave.
3. The Arpa River flowing strongly beneath the Areni-1 cave.
4. The Arpa River guided between the houses that sit below the cave.

Areni-1 sits in Vayots Dzor, Armenia's high, dry, southern wine country, about a ninety-minute drive southeast of Yerevan. You reach it by pulling off the road near the village of Areni, crossing the Arpa River, and climbing a little way up the gorge to a dark opening in the cliff at roughly one thousand metres of altitude. Locals call it the Birds' Cave. It is a three-chambered karst cave, the kind water carves slowly out of limestone, and the moment you step inside you understand why it matters: the air is cool and still and dry, and it barely moves with the seasons.

That stable air is the quiet hero of this whole story. A cave that holds an even temperature and low humidity for thousands of years is a natural cellar, and it is also a natural time capsule. Organic things that rot away everywhere else, grape skins, seeds, vines, leather, even soft tissue, can survive here in a way they survive almost nowhere on the planet. Keep that in mind, because it is the reason Armenia can prove what it is about to claim.

Serious excavation only began in 2007, led by the Armenian archaeologist Boris Gasparyan with an international team that included Gregory Areshian of UCLA, and backed by National Geographic and the Gfoeller Renaissance Foundation. What they pulled out of the floor over the following years reset the timeline of wine.

What they actually found in Trench 1

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1. The entrance to Areni-1, hidden in the high red rocks of the Noravank canyon.
2. Swallows' nests high on the entrance wall, the reason locals call it the Birds' Cave.
3. The entrance gate to the Areni-1 cave.
4. A pot from Trench 1 with its markings intact, remarkably well preserved with a little restoration.
5. The oldest winery itself, up close and in place in Trench 1.
6. Trench 1.
7. Clay amphoras outside the cave, the Armenian karasses.
8. The red rocks of the Noravank gorge that hold the cave.
9. The Arpa River below.

In the first gallery of the cave, in a section the team labelled Trench 1, the floor gave up an entire winemaking sequence, not a single lucky object. There was a shallow clay platform, slightly tilted, for treading grapes. Below its lip sat a deeper clay vat, big enough to hold something like fifty litres, where the pressed juice ran down to ferment. Around them lay grape seeds, the remains of pressed grapes, withered lengths of grapevine, a cup and a drinking bowl, and pottery stained with the residue of what had been made here.

Then came the proof that turned a nice theory into a headline. Chemical analysis of the residue found malvidin, the pigment that gives red wine its colour and one that is very hard to explain any other way. So, this was not just fruit juice left to spoil. It was red wine, pressed and fermented on purpose, most likely from an early domesticated grape closely related to the Areni vines that still grow in that same valley today. You can stand at the oldest winery on earth and then drink the descendant of its grape a few kilometres down the road.

The dating landed it in the Late Chalcolithic, around 4100 to 4000 BC, which makes the setup more than six thousand years old and at least a thousand years older than the previous record holder. The findings were published in 2011, and the wording archaeologists reached for is the wording that matters: not the oldest wine, but the oldest known winemaking facility, the oldest place built to press, ferment and store wine as a repeatable act. A winery, in other words, and the first one we have ever found.

Oldest wine or oldest winery? Settling the Armenia question

Here is something worth sitting with, more than an argument to win. Both Armenia and Georgia get called the birthplace of wine, and people assume the two claims cancel each other out. They do not. They are two different records, and both are true.

Georgia holds the record for the oldest wine. At two neolithic villages south of Tbilisi, Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, scientists found tartaric acid, the chemical fingerprint of grape wine, soaked into the walls of pottery jars dated to around 6000 BC. That is roughly eight thousand years old, and it is currently the earliest hard evidence anywhere that a human being made wine. The work was led by the biomolecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern and published in 2017.

Armenia holds a different record: the oldest winery. Areni-1 is younger than Georgia's jars by roughly two thousand years, but it is not a jar. It is a place, purpose-built, with a press and a fermentation vat and storage, all in one room. Think of the distinction this way. Georgia's evidence is a molecule in a pot, and it tells you wine was being drunk. Armenia's evidence is a factory floor, and it tells you wine was being made, deliberately and at some kind of scale. Oldest wine, oldest winery. Georgia proves the drink existed. Armenia proves the industry did. Neither one erases the other, and the moment you stop treating them as rivals, both stories get bigger.

And there is a bigger thing hiding behind the rivalry, one worth sitting with. We talk about Georgia and Armenia as two separate countries, which they are today and have been, under shifting names, for a few centuries. Wind the clock back six thousand years, though, and those borders simply were not there. The people working this land, treading grapes in a cave in one valley, soaking wine into a clay jar in another, were very likely neighbours and kin, descendants of the same wandering families, crossing a region that had no lines drawn on it yet. So perhaps the honest answer is that the cradle of wine was never one country's to own. It was a corner of the world, shared long before it was divided, that happened to work out how to make the thing we are all still drinking.

Why the first winemakers worked beside their dead

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1. The Areni-1 information board showing the three human skulls set in clay vessels beside the press.
2. Reconstructions of the faces behind those skulls, as they may have looked before the burial ritual.
3. Trench 1, where the grape pips, stalks and twigs were found.
4. The part of the Trench 1 dig where the pips sat inside the pots.

There is a detail from Trench 1 that stays with you, and it complicates the cosy picture of ancient people making wine for dinner. Right beside the press and the vat, set against the wall of the cave, the excavators found three human skulls, each one placed inside a clay vessel. Wine gear and human remains, in the same small space, from the same moment in time.

The reading the archaeologists give is that this was not a tavern. It was a ritual and burial site, and the winemaking was part of the ceremony. The panels at the cave describe features tied to funeral rites, even funeral games, sitting alongside the winemaking equipment. In other words, the oldest winery we have ever found was not built to make a casual drink. It was built to make something sacred, poured for the dead as much as the living.

I think that is worth sitting with, especially if you work in wine now. Six thousand years ago, before wine was a commodity, before it was a label or a score or a supermarket shelf, it was already carrying meaning. It was tangled up with memory, ceremony and loss. When we say a wine should tell a story, this cave is the oldest evidence we have that it always did. The story is not a marketing invention laid on top of the drink. It is the older thing. The drink grew up around it.

The cave that also kept a shoe, a brain and a million years

Areni-1 did not only preserve the wine, and the rest of what it held tells you why the wine survived. In the same cave, the same dry, cool, unmoving air also kept the world's oldest known leather shoe, a single-piece cowhide moccasin shaped to a right foot, European size 37, stuffed with grass, and roughly 5,500 years old. It kept preserved human brain tissue inside one of those buried skulls. It is one of the richest Chalcolithic sites on earth precisely because nothing here fully decayed.

And the cave was old long before any of that. Near the entrance, archaeologists found simple Oldowan stone tools that suggest an early human, most likely Homo erectus, sheltered here somewhere between one and one and a half million years ago. Layer upon layer of humans used this one opening in the cliff, and near the top of that stack, six thousand years ago, some of them made wine.

For the wine story, the shoe is not a side note. It is the proof of concept. The same conditions that mummified a leather shoe for five and a half thousand years are what preserved the grape seeds, the withered vines and the stain in the pottery. No cave, no evidence. Armenia's claim to the oldest winery on earth survives because of where its first winemakers happened to work.

Why the oldest winery on earth is a marketing tragedy

Here is what gets me, as someone who sells wine stories for a living. Most countries would build their entire national identity on a claim like this. They would put it on the currency. Armenia holds the single most evocative origin story in all of wine, the oldest winery on the planet, a cave you can actually walk into, ninety minutes from the capital, and it barely tells anyone. The Areni-1 that changed the history of wine is marked, at the roadside, with a modest sign and a locked gate.

Meanwhile a bottle of Areni sits on a shelf abroad next to a Cotes du Rhone, at a similar price, with nothing on the label to say that the grape in the glass grows in the valley of the oldest winery ever found, or that its ancestors were pressed in a cave by people who buried their dead beside the vat. The facts are extraordinary. On the shelf they are doing precisely nothing, because nobody is telling them.

This is the exact gap between having a story and using one, and it is the gap I spend my working life closing. The oldest winery on earth does not sell a single extra bottle of Armenian wine on its own. The telling of it does. Part 1 of this series pulled apart the words, orange and amber and yellow, qvevri and karas, and made the same point from a different angle: in wine, the words are the product. This cave is where those words begin.

Six thousand years ago, in the cold and the dark, someone figured out how to turn grapes into wine on purpose and left us the proof. A press, a vat, a stain in the clay, still sitting in a cave above the Arpa River. The least we can do, all these centuries later, is tell people they did it here.

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Written by

Margot van Lieshout DipWSET FWS RV

Wine marketeer, sales expert with over 20 years in the trade, public speaker and international wine judge. Thousands of wines scored from Steiermark to Ningxia, and a trade she knows from the inside out. Wine with Margot is where she helps wine brands tell the stories that sell them.

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