Miami — The world’s earliest evidence of grape wine-making has been detected in 8,000-year-old pottery jars unearthed in Georgia, making the tradition almost 1,000 years older than previously thought, researchers said Monday.Before, the oldest chemical evidence of wine in the Near East dated to 5,400-5,000 BC (about 7,000 years ago) and was from the Zagros Mountains of Iran, said the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer-reviewed US journal.The world’s very first wine is thought to have been made from rice in China about 9,000 years ago."We believe this is the oldest example of the domestication of a wild-growing Eurasian grapevine solely for the production of wine," said co-author Stephen Batiuk, a senior research associate at the University of Toronto.Scientists on the team came from the US, Canada, Denmark, France, Italy, Israel and Georgia. They have been working for the past four years to re-analyse archeological sites that were found deca...
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