Greeks and Romans drank wine watered down, drinking undiluted wine was a sign that you were an uncouth animalistic barbarian. There was always more water in the drink, with the usual ratios being from 2/3 to even 5/6 water and the rest wine. If the water source was of low quality, then they added wine to water out of necessity, in order to purify the low quality water and to give it a better taste.
They also found wine to be a strategic trade good with the Germans, who weren't familiar with alcohol production yet. They recognized Germans drinking undiluted wine, and drinking to get drunk, was causing widespread social dysfunction and would push it on them as a way to destabilize them. The German reactions to wine were rather similar to Indian reactions to liquor.
Some other alcohol facts, and something of a misconception, the history of alcohol has mostly been one of seeking higher concentrations. Early wine, as I understand, was actually quite potent and often laced with psychedelics, but beer was very low alcohol content. You hear all this shit about how even the children drank 50 billion beers a day. It's very misleading, in colonial times it was called "small beer" and was <1% ABV, basically you'd have to drink a six pack just to get the equivalent of one drink. This stuff was, for all purposes, nonalcoholic. Kvass, if you find it, would be the direct equivalent. They drank the stuff like soda but they weren't getting drunk off of it.
By the Middle Ages, alchemy had discovered how to distill things, which alchemists called the "spirit" of the original substance. When applied to alcohol, they discovered something that was initially treated as medicine, but spread as a recreational drug and eventually, through overuse, into a socially sanctioned beverage, "spirits" (liquor). These early distilleries were very unsafe and often blew up, people compare it to meth labs. This new liquor was, then as now, cheaper to get drunk on than beer and wine, and so it enabled the lower orders to drink larger amounts than ever before, which (combined with a culture that hadn't really figured out just how nasty this consumption was) meant drunkenness on a massive scale (as people in places like Frontier America or "Gin Craze" Britain drank liquor like they used to drink beer). Later temperance efforts were part of society coming to grips with what was essentially a drug epidemic, no different than abuse of opium or crack or such in other cultures.
A similar parallel in terms of introduction could be seen in the diffusion of soda, which was first treated as a medicine, then as a sort of generic health product, and then recreational drug, and finally as a beverage. Unlike alcohol, soda was reformed out of its drug-like properties (the coca and other herbs used, science marched on and people understood carbonated water wasn't anything special).
