About Georgia
In Tbilisi’s State Museum there is an 18th century BC silver funeral mug, elaborately embossed: on it you see a procession of deer, and a procession of men disguised as foxes, each bearing a cup, all testifying to the wine fertility-cults which flourished in Georgia in antiquity. Indeed, Georgians are now thought by archaeologists to have been the first people in the world to discover how wild grape juice turned into wine when it was left buried throughout the winter in a shallow pit: carbon-dating of grape-pips and examination of residues on pottery shows evidence of winemaking as long ago as 7000-5000 BC – a tradition which has continued unbroken ever since. Farmers still store wine in giant cone-shaped clay jars, buried in earth and topped with a wooden lid, as they did thousands of years ago. Some linguists believe our word ‘wine’ itself comes from the Georgian word ‘gvino’.
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