Archaeologists digging in southern Armenia's Yeghegnadzor region have discovered what is believed to be the world's oldest winery. At the site, which dates back 6,100 years and is nestled, reports The Wall Street Journal, within "a complex of 39 [hillside] caves," diggers unearthed drinking bowls, a large clay fermentation vessel and the fossilized remains of crushed grapes.

The rich just get richer. Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber ("Phantom of the Opera," "Cats," et al.) sold $5.6 million-worth of wine at a Sotheby's auction in Hong Kong on January 22. Among the 748 auction-lots — all from temperature-controlled cellars at Sydmonton Court, Lloyd Webber's 10,000-acre estate in England's Berkshire district — were ten cases of 2005 Lafite Rothschild, 21 cases of 2005 Mouton Rothschild, and four cases of 2000 Pétrus. This was Lloyd Webber's second lucrative leap into the wine auction fray. In 1997, a Sotheby's London sale of older Bordeaux from his cellars fetched $6.1 million, an auction record at that time.

U.S. wine sales soared to over $40 billion in 2010, an all-time high.

Do you have friends or loved ones who suffer headaches, stuffy noses or skin rashes when they drink wine? Well, Italian researchers have just identified the specific glycoproteins in wine that trigger such reactions, thus signaling the future possibility of non-allergenic wines. Stay tuned.

Women who drink two glasses of wine per day are 60 percent less likely to develop heart disease than non-drinkers, according to a Harvard Medical School study published in last October's issue of Heart Rhythm. The study also found that women who drink moderate amounts of wine are 40 percent less apt to suffer sudden cardiac death, an abrupt short-circuiting of the heart, than their tee-totalling sisters. The findings were based on a decades-long study of 85,000 female health professionals by Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, a Harvard teaching affiliate.

Fiji Water is turning H₂O into wine. Well, sort of. The American owned Pacific-island water brand has purchased California's Justin Vineyards and Winery, and retained the former owners, Justin and Deborah Baldwin, to run things. Best known for Isosceles, a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc, Justin owns over 80 acres of vines in the Paso Robles AVA and produces 50,000 cases of wine annually.

Napa Valley's Cosentino Signature Wines is no more. The Napa Valley producer, which had been on shaky financial footing for some time, was forced to close its doors last November, when, according to Chairman Larry Soldinger, "we were unable to secure the required funding that was necessary to refinance our existing debt obligations." And barely two months later, Cosentino's Napa Valley winery was sold for between $8 and $9 million to Vintage Wine Estates, the owner of Girard Winery, among other California brands.

Bill Foley has purchased another winery. Last November, the insurance mogul turned vintner, bought the Eos winery in California's Paso Robles AVA. And his ever-growing stable of wineries — which includes Sebastiani, Firestone and Chalk Hill in California, Clifford Bay and Vavasour in New Zealand, and Three Rivers in Washington State — now totals 15.

Hall, one of Napa Valley's fast-rising Cabernet Sauvignon producers, has purchased a majority stake in Roessler, a Sonoma-based maker of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Roger Roessler, who founded the 7,000-case winery in 2000, will remain as a partner.

QRW mourns the passing of Bernard de Nonancourt, founding president of the Laurent-Perrier Champagne group, who died last November at the age of 90. Laurent-Perrier was a small family firm when Nonancourt took control in 1948. But over the next 50 years, he built the company into Champagne's third-largest, while also acquiring the houses of Salon, Delamotte and de Castellane. QRW is saddened also by the passing in January of Abdallah "Ab" Simon, chairman from 1974 to 1999 of Seagram's Chateau & Estates Wine Company, which under his leadership became the foremost U.S. importer of classified Bordeaux. Indeed, at one time Simon was such a powerful player in Bordeaux that, according to The New York Times' Frank Prial, his annual visits to that region "[were] probably more important than those of the President of France." He was 88 years old.

When it comes to kissing up to the growing Chinese market, the Bordeaux First Growth Château Mouton Rothschild is not about to be outdone by its first growth cousin, Château Lafite Rothschild. Indeed, while Lafite is stamping bottles of its 2008 offering with a red Chinese number eight, Mouton is emblazoning its 2008 bottling with a label decorated by Xu Lei, one of China's leading artists.

Napa Valley's Charles Krug Winery has received the Governor of California's Historic Preservation Award for artfully restoring two of its older buildings, the 1872 Redwood Cellar and the 1881 Carriage House. The painstaking rehab took almost two years, during which time, reports the Napa Valley Register, "the Redwood Cellar's soaring stone walls and cathedral-like atmosphere were preserved and, in the Carriage House, finely hewn redwood planks from the winery's heirloom wine tanks were salvaged and refitted to beautiful effect."

Virginia's Kluge Estate Vineyard & Winery has been sold at foreclosure auction to its major lien-holder, Farm Credit of the Virginias bank, which paid $19 million for the property. Included in the deal were 164 acres of vineyards, a winery, a barrel cave, a tasting room and various staff houses.

California's Culinary Institute of America (aka "CIA") has announced five 2011 inductees into its Vintners Hall of Fame. The honorees are Joel Peterson, founder of Ravenswood winery; Vernon Singleton, U.C. Davis Emeritus Professor of Enology; Bob Trinchero, owner of Sutter Home Winery and Trinchero Napa Valley; the late Richard Graff, co-founder of Chalone Vineyards, who is being inducted as a "Pioneer"; and the late August Sebastiani, founder of the Sebastani winery, who also enters the Hall as a "Pioneer." Previous inductees include Dr. Maynard Amerine, Ernest and Julio Gallo, Robert Mondavi, André Tchelistcheff, Jess Jackson and Paul Draper.

Randall Grahm's Washington State wine outpost, Pac Rim, was sold in January to the Mariani family, owners of New York's Banfi Vintners and Tuscany's Castello Banfi winery, for an undisclosed sum. The Mariani's said they were buying Pac Rim as an investment and had no plans to make any personnel or distribution changes. A producer of Riesling wines mainly, Pac Rim made just under 200,000 cases in 2010.

St. Louis (Missouri) Community College scientists say they've developed a transgenic yeast strain that can produce resveratrol in white wine. A cancer-preventing, heart-disease-reducing compound secreted in the skin-pigment of red grapes, resveratrol is pretty much non-existent in white grapes. But the new yeast strain, which is currently awaiting a patent, could certainly change that.

The Burgundy négociant Laboure-Roi has sold 17 acres of prime Meursault vineyards, including all of the Premier Cru Monopole Clos des Boucheres and a portion of the Premier Cru Poruzots, to a group of New York investors, who plan to lease the vineyards to two of Meursault's top producers, Domaine Roulot and Domaine Comtes Lafon.

As the Lloyd Webber sale (see above) suggests, there's no recession today when it comes to wine auctions. To the contrary, $408-million worth of wine was auctioned worldwide in 2010 — up $175 million from the previous year — and a new, single-bottle, auction record was set last October, when an 1869 Château Lafite-Rothschild fetched $232,692 at Sotheby's in Hong Kong.

The Port house Taylor-Fladgate has just released Scion, a pre-phylloxera tawny Port from a cask laid down in 1855. Only 1,400 bottles of the ancient draught — which comes in a specially designed crystal decanter packed inside a finely wrought wooden instrument case — are available worldwide. But at $3,000 a throw, only millionaires need apply.