🍷 Karas

The karas is an Armenian clay vessel, egg-shaped, in which wine ferments and is stored. One seen in the village of Chiva, in Vayots Dzor, holds 240 gallons, about 900 litres, and is too wide to pass through the doorway.

The karas reached its peak in Urartu in the first millennium BC. At the fortress of Karmir Blur, archaeologists found cellars with hundreds of karases standing in rows, half-buried in the ground. Cuneiform on each rim gave its volume, and a single cellar is estimated to have held over 100,000 gallons of wine. Potters made six to ten at a time, building up the walls with their fingers. The hardest part was drying and firing something that big.

Law took notice too. In 1184 Mkhitar Gosh gave karases a chapter in his Datastanagirk, and the buyer was promised something like a one-year warranty. In the villages of Vayots Dzor and Armavir the karas stayed in use into the 1990s.

Wine takes about forty days to make in a karas. Sealed, it keeps for years, but once opened it should be drunk within ten to fifteen days, so opening a karas became a ceremony, often at weddings. For the family of vessels see Clay wine vessels. The oldest trace of Armenian wine is in the Areni-1 cave, where a press, vat and jars date to 4100 to 4000 BC. Its Georgian counterpart is the Qvevri.