Wine has been a central part of life in the Italian peninsula since prehistory; in fact, along with wheat and olive oil, it formed what historians call the Mediterranean Triad, the three core agricultural products of the ancient Mediterranean world.
Archaeological evidence suggests that vines were cultivated in Sicily as early as the 4th millennium BC, possibly by Mycenaean traders, but it was the Phoenicians and, in particular, the Greeks who introduced more advanced viticulture to the southern regions of what is today our beloved country. They called the region Oenotria, or “land of vines.”
