Where in the world are the oldest vineyards and wineries?

This title is actually two separate questions, because the oldest wineries are not necessarily associated with the oldest vineyards, and vice versa. So, I need two lots of data to answer this question, at the global level.

Wine-making itself goes back a very long way, of course. It has been noted (The oldest vineyard in the world is 6,100 years old) that:

The Greeks had Dionysus — the ancient Greek god of wine, among other things — who was worshipped as early as 1,500—11,000 BCE and is referenced in the works of Homer and Aesop. Mentions of wine can be traced back to Georgia in 6,000 BCE, Iran in 5,000 BCE and Sicily in 4,000 BCE; and the Egyptians also tried their hand at winemaking with all kinds of grapes, as well as with figs, dates and pomegranates. The alcohol is even mentioned 231 times in biblical literature. 

It was during a 2007 research expedition in Armenia ... that a drinking bowl, grape seeds, desiccated vines, pottery sherds and fermentation jars were discovered and dated as 6,100 years old ... This discovery is said to be the earliest example of wine production — with the grapes in question most likely the Vitis vinifera species, according to botanists.

However, there are no extant wineries this old. Indeed, the World Atlas tells us that The oldest wineries in the world are apparently as shown in the table above. According to this information, Germany has by far the oldest known winery (at 1,161 years old), with France also having one at c. 1,000 years old. Italy’s oldest seems to be 882 years old. By comparison, Spain’s is only 474 years old, with Switzerland right behind. Outside Europe, Mexico’s oldest is 426 years old, and South Africa’s is 335 years old.

However, as I noted, this has little to do with the oldest vineyards. Plants have an upper limit to their life-times, and we cannot expect the above sorts of numbers for their ages. For this reason, there is an Old Vine Registry available online, which lists information about all of the known old vineyards. To quote from the website:

The Old Vine Registry is a grassroots, volunteer effort inspired and begun by wine critic Jancis Robinson and several of her colleagues. Robinson first started writing about the heritage of old vines more than 15 years ago, and in 2010 she and writer Tamlyn Currin began compiling a registry of old vines, triggered by a growing sense that these old vineyards were important elements of cultural and scientific heritage, as well as the source of some particularly beautiful wine. 

The launch of the Old Vine Conference provoked a lot of interest in the Old Vine Registry, and it got to the point where all parties involved realised they needed something more searchable, more accessible, more elegant, and more useful. The project needed to become an online database, somewhere people could go to find old vineyards, learn about them, track down the wines made from them and the people farming them. With the help of Alder Yarrow, author of Vinography.com ... (who handily has a background in digital marketing and user experience), funding was found, talented developers were tracked down, and under Yarrow’s direction, the real Old Vine Registry was born.

By and large, the Registry lists vineyards that are at least 35 years old, with currently more than 2,650 entries listed worldwide. I will explore these data in more detail in future blog posts; but for now let’s simply take an overview of the oldest vineyards. The graph above shows a count of how many vineyards there are for each of the ages greater than 50 years old. (Note that the vertical axis is on a logarithmic scale.) Surprisingly, there are 2,335 such vineyards, scattered over the whole globe. Seriously, would you have guessed such a large number?

It is worth noting, as an aside, that not all of the actual ages are necessarily perfectly precise. For example, you can see that there are three odd peaks in the data (ie. the top three points in the graph). These three points denote vineyards listed as being planted in 1930, 1960 and 1970, respectively. Clearly, these are simply approximate times, presumably based on memory rather than written records. [Update: please see the first Comment below.] However, the other entries seem to be quite precise.

Anyway, here is the list of the locations and ages of the very oldest vineyards. You will note that eastern Europe gets mixed in with Germany and Italy, in comparison to the above list of wineries, and that France and Spain are quite some way down the list. Note, also, that only the top 5 vineyards would actually make it onto the wineries list, and that none of these are actually in that list, anyway. The oldest wineries and vineyards really are not connected at all.

Thanks to Alder Yarrow for providing me with direct access to The Old Vine Registry’s data.