(CNN) — Forget France. It turns out, the real birthplace of wine may be in a cave in Armenia.
An international research team says it has found the world’s oldest winery in a paper published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed Journal of Archaeological Science.
“It’s the oldest proven case of documented and dedicated wine production, stretching back the horizons of this important development by thousands of years,” said Gregory Areshian, co-director of the excavation and assistant director of the University of California Los Angeles’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.
Areshian says that clay pots and vats discovered at a sprawling cave system in southern Armenia near the border with Iran shows signs of an organized effort to press and distill grapes during the Copper Age, about 6,000 years ago.
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