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Areni-1 winery
Oldest known winery, Armenia, c. 4100 BCE
Archaeologists dug up a wine press, fermentation vats and storage jars inside Areni-1 cave in Armenia. Dating puts the winery around 4100 BCE.
The find was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science in January 2011 by a team led by Hans Barnard of UCLA. Excavations by Gregory Areshian and the Armenian archaeologist Boris Gasparyan ran from 2007 to 2010 in a cave near the village of Areni.
The team found a shallow clay wine press about a metre long, a fermentation vat roughly 60 centimetres deep, storage jars and drinking cups, along with grape skins, seeds and withered vines. Radiocarbon dating gave a range of about 4100 to 4000 BCE, which makes the site some 6,100 years old, older than the Egyptian pyramids.
Chemical tests found malvidin, a pigment found in red wine. An outside expert pointed out that other fruits, such as pomegranates, also contain it, and that tartaric acid, a stronger sign of grapes, was not reported. About 20 burials lay around the press, which may suggest a ritual use, but that remains an interpretation. Older traces of wine have been reported from Iran, but those are residues, not a winery.
Whether this is the oldest winery depends on how 'winery' is defined, since earlier wine residues may come from simple household production. The word 'oldest known' reflects what has been found so far, and new digs could change it.