Aye, growing up in a church that teaches teetotalism I heard people say that ① wine was less alcoholic back then becaue you had to ferment by leaving things out to gather yeast from the air and not from industrially produced active dry yeast powder, and ② what alcohol wine may have contained was then a necessary evil because of pathogens in water before the proliferation of treatment plants.

I'm curious how true ① is, and/or if lack of distillation made wine weaker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquor#Distillation_of_wine makes it sound like the process might have been uncommon knowledge still in the process of refinement).