I learned that beer and wine were consumed on a daily basis to substitute contaminated water in middle age in Europe.

Making wine is still a very laborious process today with mechanized farming, pumping systems, stainless steel vessels and cleaning agents.

From my experience of working in wine industry I have learned that especially mechanization of work progress and the availability of cleaning agents are essential to produce wine in a price range that is affordable to broad mass of population.

According to my limited knowledge about ancient winemaking, nearly everything was made by physical labor with nothing but hot water and sulfur as cleaning agents. I’m aware of the low quality of wine back then but the amount of work to produce enough wine to provide for everyone seems immeasurable to me.