Before wine came to Southern Italy (more on that later), thousands of years of history preceded it. Wine was not invented by anyone (imagine how many statues that person would have been given), but is in fact the result of a natural process: fermentation. It is enough for natural yeasts to spend some time in a quantity of grape juice and, technically speaking, wine is the result. So in a sense wine has always existed. The real starting point of the history of wine, however, is the moment humans intervened in this process and it became a drink produced for consumption.
Since producing wine is a process that takes a long time, it is assumed that the first wine lovers were not roaming hunter-gatherers, but people who had settled permanently and practised agriculture. They used the grapes of wild-growing vines and, since we have a good idea where these occurred in this period, the place where wine was possibly first cultivated can be delineated fairly well.
Based on archaeological finds, it is estimated that winegrowing arose around 7,000 BC in the Fertile Crescent, the area in the Middle East that also includes the Tigris and the Euphrates. The origin of agriculture in general is also situated in this area. Ironically, not much wine is drunk there nowadays.
The oldest wine cellar was recently found in Israel and dates from 3,500 years ago. It was a room containing some 40 large earthenware jars, several of which still held the typical residue of wine (https://www.history.com/news/one-of-historys-oldest-wine-cellars-discovered). What these wines tasted like will forever remain a mystery, but Georgian wine perhaps comes closest. It is a wine made according to a thousands-of-years-old tradition (very curious to taste it).
In the next post we follow the journey of wine from its place of origin to Southern Italy.