🇦🇲 ROADTRIP ~ Day 3 – South Armenia – Noravank Monastery / Areni Cave / Trinity Winery

ITINERARY

Areni Lodge -> Noravank Monastery / Noravank Monastery -> Areni Caves / Areni Caves -> Trinity Winery / Trinity Winery -> Yerevan

NORAVANK MONASTERY

Vayots Dzor

A beautifully preserved Monastic complex is built in the 13th c. Middle Ages

There are 3 churches on site all with beautiful ornate architecture and intricate designs and many beautiful traditional Armenian khatchkars

Its best known for its 2 storey Surb Astvatsatsin (Holy Mother of God) Church, which you can access via a reall narrow stone staircase, which has now been BLOCKED OFF 😦 very sad! you cant climb this anymore and this was one of the highlights (im assuming too many ppl fell off it)

The burial basement of the main Surb Astvatstsin church – has dirt floor with few tombstones still jutting out

Beautiful intricately carved stones that are all over the floor of both the churches of the monastery

ARENI CAVES

Vayots Dzor

Areni Caves 1 is a chambered karstic cave located in Arpa River Basin in the Vayots Dzor Region

Excavations were done in 2007 and evidence found dates back to 4300-3400 BC

Because of the low humidity, the environment is ideal for preserving and due to this microclimate, there are many well preserved organic remains – the worlds oldest shoe (3600-3500 BC) basketry and clothing – 6 trenches have been discovered

The existing map, they are still excavating and more and more is being found

The oldest shoe was found from here and was taken to america to test and check a few times to make sure of its age – the 2nd oldest shoe is in Georgia, they were pretty pissed off when we found this shoe in Armenia! Lol

6100 years ago they made wine and made rituals in these caves and lived in here

The oldest leather shoe dated back to 3500BC – its now in Yerevan museum

Because of this climate in the cave the shoe was preserved so well, the archaeologists were also able to find remains of well-preserved barley, wheat, and even apricots

Naturally water formed caves, not volcanic – this area was under the ocean before – obsidian, fossils all can be found in here

Human sacrifices and rituals happened here in this part of the caves – Water oil milk & wine were used in the rituals

The last area – dates back 6100 years ago and this area was for fermenting the wines and remains of the wines were found here – the oldest winery in the world!

Ummm… they have also found evidence of canibalism here just recently, there were bones that were boiled and had some meat left on it with human teeth marks

TRINITY WINERY

http://trinitycv.com/

A beautiful winery we stopped at along the way where we got to do a tour and had a beautiful picnic lunch outside on the property in the gardens – great wines! Great food! Highly recommended

They make 55000 bottles a year here and in total 100,000 bottling for others

12 different labels of natural organic wines no sulfur no yeast no filtration – super vegan!

Elena and her wine tshirt hiding behind the barrells

Trinity was the first company to be certified with full organic winery

JAZZ wines!! – these were the experimental wines! – they try different things to see if they work – suits me perfectly 🙂

The factory processes all the wine in these large kegs

Rose – they get the grapes and peel it for rose they leave the skin on it for 24/48 hours or more depending on what colour they want – the flavours are extracted from the skins, the tannins come from the skins as well

Egg / fish?? cleans the tannins it binds things in the wine which is not wanted – they dont do that here in their wines its all clean and without egg or fish

The winemaker told us that under 100 sulphites you dont get headaches! Sulphites have been used for milennia but the more sulphites the more headaches… (i find that a lot of white wines in Aus give me headaches – here I havent had 1!)

My yummy vegan lunch with heaps of fresh veggies and lavosh bread

Helping the farmers – They help local farmers to make their own wines and sell them for around $5 a bottle. The farmers bring their wine and the winery bottles it for them to help them out