Corks were no doubt popping in France on Sunday after the country’s cherished Champagne area was listed as a Unesco World Heritage site.
Several Burgundy vineyards were also given the same recognition.
Unesco deemed the vineyards, cellars and sales houses for the production and sales of champagne to be culturally significant.
The Forth Bridge has also been given accolade. Unesco is engaged in its annual meeting where it is still considering sites around the world from its list of 37. Recipients will join more than 1,000 global spots considered “of outstanding value to humanity”.
In Champagne, the organisation applauded the vineyards of Aÿ and Mareuil-sur-Aÿ, along with Saint-Nicaise Hill, a street in the regional capital Reims speckled with champagne houses.
They bear "clear testimony to the development of a very specialised artisan activity that has become an agro-industrial enterprise," it said.
Special mention went to the village of Hautvillers, where popular myth holds that Benedictine monk Dom Perignon discovered the double fermentation technique that makes the wine fizz when he was confounded by corks which kept popping out of stored bottles.
His role, in fact, was the improvement of production techniques.
The Champagne area already has some of the priciest agricultural land in Europe and the honour is likely to give a boost to the local economy through increased tourism and the financial assistance provided to World Heritage sites for preservation.
In Burgundy, some of the world’s best red wines come from the slopes of the Côte de Nuits and the Côte de Beaune, south of Dijon. Unesco called them "an outstanding example of grape cultivation and wine production developed since the High Middle Ages."
