The first question we need to address is what do you mean by Arabic winemaker. Do you mean that you are an inhabitant of the Arabian peninsula who makes wine? Or do you mean that you are a speaker of Arabic who makes wine?

In the first instance, although we have attestation of wine being present in Pre-Islamic Arabia (see the wine-poetry of the time and the hadith that purport to be from that time) there is little evidence of wine being grown in the Arabian peninsula. The only place it could probably be grown would be in the south in Yemen, where there are non-desert climates, but we don’t really have evidence of that.

Ok, so that is out. What about a winemaker who speaks Arabic? This is a more fruitful avenue as we have examples of Arabic use beyond the dry Arabian peninsula. For example, ancient Arabic texts in Jordan. We also know of the Ghassanids and Lakhmids, two Arab tribes that ruled as vassals for the Byzantines and Sassanians in the north of the Arabian peninsula and the Levant (mainly Syria and Jordan). Again not great wine growing country, but better than the Arabian peninsula. We could even stretch the pre-Islamic Arab-speaking world to include Palestine and Lebanon, where good wine can be grown.

What I think you mean is, pardon my presumption, what would happen to me, a wine-grower, when the Islamic empire took over my territory in Syria, Egypt, Persia, North Africa etc.

The short answer is nothing.

The longer answer, is that Arab conquests did not Islamize the territories they took over as rapidly as sometimes believed. For example, scholars of Egypt talk about an ongoing process of Islamization that took place between the 8th and 10th centuries. This puts the conversion, at the earliest, of Egypt a century later than the arrival of Muslims in 639 to 646.

So, as a winegrower, you would have had a century, at the very least, where you were surrounded lots of people who drank wine.

The corollary to this slow Islamization was that when the Muslims first invaded, they did not carry out extensive attacks against non-Muslims or habits deemed un-Islamic. On a practical level, they simply did not have the manpower. On a doctrinal level, you have the concept of dhimmi. This is a term referring to non-Muslim inhabitants of Muslim domains (typically Christians and Jews) who were offered protection and autonomous rule as long as they paid the head tax, jizya, and abided by certain rules.

When it came to wine, it was frowned upon for non-Muslims to sell it to Muslims. Beyond that, they were allowed to make and drink their own wine. So for example, we have archaeological and literary evidence of Christian monasteries being producers of wine well into the Islamic period.

And this pattern continued, more or less, until the colonial period, when alcohol and its presence in the Islamic world was radically altered. There were, of course, times where leaders would try to crack down on wine consumption among the populace, but that generally took the form of closing taverns and smashing wine jugs, at its most intense. There is some evidence that one leader tried to limit the sale of grapes, but this was more noteworthy for it oddity than a true reflection of the fate of a wine-grower.

Most importantly, the main target of these activist rulers were Muslim wine drinkers. This does not even get into the historical tradition of Islamic wine poetry, which I could talk more about, if there is interest.

Citations

Yaacov Lev, “The Fatimid Caliphs, the Copts, and the Coptic Church” Medieval Encounters. 2015, Vol. 21 Issue 4/5, p.390-410.

Mennat-Allah El-Dorry, “Grapes, Raisins and Wine? Archaeobotanical Finds from an Egyptian Monastery,” in Plants and people in the African past : progress in African archaeobotany ed. Anna Maria Mercuri et al.(Cham, Switzerland : Springer, 2018), 90-99.

Kathryn Kueny, The Rhetoric of Sobriety: Wine in Early Islam (Albany, NY:State University of New York Press, 2001).

Paulina Lewicka, Food and Foodways of Medieval Cairenes: Aspects of Life in an Islamic Metropolis of the Eastern Mediterranean (Leiden: Brill, 2011)