Highlighted talking points from the article below.
Today's wine is nothing like wine from the Bible. No sugar added or very little if any yeast. No distillation processes and the key here is they mixed it or diluted it with water.
Now if you want to drink unmixed 12% wine that is your business but you should be aware that other opinions are out there.
from the link below, highlighted points of interest:
So, to start with, we're talking about a different amount of this available; we're talking about a different alcoholic content. Now, there's something else you need to understand - very important:
wine in ancient times was boiled or mixed; boiled or mixed - and I'm not just telling you this because Bible writers talk about it. I'm telling you this is secular history. Everybody knows this was the case.
And if you take wine that was typically two to four percent, and you boil it, what happens to the alcohol? It's gone. What you have left is a paste, that can then be remixed with water.On the other hand, if you just mix it with water - three parts to one would have been the average, three parts water to one part of wine - you dilute the alcohol content significantly. And I say,
in ancient times, the wine was either boiled - and out went all of its alcohol content - or it was mixed. Professor Samuel Lee of Cambridge University says that yayin - the Hebrew word for wine - or oinos - the Greek word - does not refer only to intoxicating liquor made by fermentation, but both words - but in particular, his interest is the word yayin - refers to a thick, un-intoxicating syrup or paste produced by boiling to make it storable.
This thick substance was stored, then, in skins. It is a thick syrup. It is, somebody said, to the grade of jelly, and once it's put in a skin that's supple, it can be squeezed out of the skin onto bread - like your grape jelly on bread - or dissolved in water and mixed to become a drink. So says the professor at Cambridge, and he draws this from a description of this very process by Pliny, the ancient Roman historian, who said this is what they did; Pliny talks about an un-intoxicating wine.Another ancient writer from Athens - and here's a direct quote that came from a wonderful article by Robert Stein - it says, "The gods" - this is a Greek writer in Athens - "The gods have revealed wine to mortals to be the greatest blessing for those who use it right, but for those who use it without measure, the reverse. For it gives food to them that take it, and strength and mind and body. In medicine, it is most beneficial. It can be mixed with liquid and drugs, and it brings aid to the wounded."In daily life, to those who mix and drink it moderately, it gives good cheer. But if you overstep the bounds, it brings violence; mix it half and half, and you get madness; unmixed, bodily collapse." Plutarch, in his
Symposiacs, says as a beverage, it was always thought of as a mixed drink. Quote -
"'We call a mixture wine, although the larger of the components is water.' The ratio of water might vary," says Robert Stein, "but only barbarians drank it unmixed, and a mixture of wine and water of equal parts was seen as strong drink" - equal parts, half water, half wine, was strong drink "and frowned on."
The term wine" - or oinos "in the ancient world, then, did not mean wine as we understand it today, but wine mixed with water or from a paste, completely without any intoxicating power because it had all been boiled out." Strong drink would be half and half, or unmixed, and this was unacceptable to a cultured person, to drink strong drink; unacceptable. A document called The Apostolic Tradition indicates that the early church followed this custom, serving only mixed wine, whether from a syrup paste or a liquid base.The wine, then, of biblical times could well have been unintoxicating, from a syrup base, or marginally intoxicating, because its fermentation had been diluted so much in the mixture with water. Taking a very conservative estimate, for example, if water is three-to-one mixed with wine, the level of alcohol would be between 2.25 and 2.75 percent, which is well under the 3.2 percent alcohol necessary to be classified as an intoxicating drink. Four to one would take you down to 1.8 to 2.2, and the only way you could possibly get drunk would be just to consume volumes of it.
Now, what are we saying? Homer, Plato, Pliny, and other ancient writers detail the practice of diluting wine with water, of also boiling it down to a paste. Homer's Odyssey - you remember that from your English Lit class, or from your European Lit class? Homer's Odyssey refers to mixtures as high as twenty to one; twenty parts water, one part fermented juice. The Greeks wrote of those who drank undiluted wine as barbarians. The Jewish Mishnah - the Mishnah is the codification of Jewish laws that are imposed upon the Jewish people.In the Mishnah, four cups of wine were poured out for the Passover, mixed with water, two or three parts. So, the wine consumed in the Passover - according to the Mishnah called modzug - is two or three parts water; and again, commonly wine was boiled so that all the alcohol evaporated. The residue was a paste mixed with water, alcohol free - common in Rome, common in Egypt, common in Jewish life - called yayin mevushal by the Jews. When you look at the Scripture, you see this. Song of Solomon talks the beautiful talk between the bridegroom and the bride about mixed wine, mixing wine.Proverbs 23:30 talks about mixing wine.
Isaiah 65:11, mixed wine. In Proverbs 9, there is a statement there that relates to this, in the category of wisdom, being wise; Proverbs 9: "Wisdom has built her house" - verse 1 - "Hewn out her seven pillars; prepared her food and mixed her wine." "Come, eat my food" - verse 5 - "And drink the wine I've mixed." Wisdom mixes the wine; mixed wine is important in the Bible; unmixed, strong drink, is dangerous.
They needed liquids, and there was always the danger that if you just kept taking it in, not only would you run out of the supply, but you would of necessity put yourself in a position to be drunk. That's why sometimes it was mixed up to twenty to one. But number four -
and here's the really critical thing to understand - wine was mixed with water as an antiseptic. The purpose of mixing the wine with the water was to sanitize the water; to sanitize the water - that's what's really going on - to make water safe, 'cause you can't live without water.https://www.gty.org/library/sermons-library/80-380/christians-and-alcohol 
