As you know, wine is made from the juices that come out of grapes when they are crushed and then squeezed. The juices are then collected and fermented in such a way as to create wine. In the distant past creating wine most likely involved crushing them either by feet or by hand.
Early winemaking methods are said to go as far back as as 7000-5000 BCE with people placing grapes in hollowed out logs and then crushing them with their feet. The contents would then be scooped out and fermented. Records of this comes from what is now known as Krasnodar Krai, Russia.
The ancient Egyptians would also crush their grapes manually, but they added an innovation: leftover grapes and skins would be placed in a bag which was twisted and squeezed of its juices.
The wine press as we know it today would be not be seen until the time of the Romans. In the 2nd century BCE, Marcus Cato (a.k.a. Cato the Elder) described a wine press we might be familiar with today in his work, De Agri Cultura. Basically, a beam was suspended atop a sloped container that contained grapes. Using a windlass, someone would wind down the beam to apply pressure on the grapes until the liquid pours into a container to be collected.
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