Ancient Wine

Grapes grow abundantly and reliably in the Mediterranean climate, and taste good, and even gatherers ate wild grapes (which are smaller than domesticated grapes). But the best thing about grapes has always been that you can ferment them into wine. This has several advantages. First, it preserves the grapes so that they will last for years without refrigeration. Second, it produces alcohol, which is a good source of carbohydrates for energy.

Wine is pleasant to drink; it tastes good. And, last but not least, drinking wine feels good too. People have probably been making grapes into wine since the Stone Age, even when they were just gathering wild grapes.
People began to grow grapes probably a little after they began growing wheat, maybe about 8,000 BC. Growing grapes is a more serious project, because you have to take good care of the vines for several years before you get any grapes out of them.

Athenian black-figure vase,
about 530 BC

To make wine, first press the grapes. You press grapes by putting them in a large vat (a sort of barrel) with a hole at the bottom to let the juice run out, and then getting in the vat and stomping the grapes to squish them and let the juice out, as these satyrs are doing.

Then you put the wine in wooden casks or clay pots and add yeast and let it ferment for several months (or sometimes years).

Red wine was among the things the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamon had in his tomb, about 1300 BC.

These are glasses Roman people drank wine from. See how they have little points on the bottom so they won't stand up? You had to drink all the wine in one drink.

And these are some people drinking wine, in Breughel's picture of a wedding from the 1400's AD. See in the lower left hand corner, the man pouring wine from a big clay jug into smaller ones?