The earliest recipe for vinum Graecum is in Cato the Elder's manual of farming, De agri cultura, compiled around 150 BC.
Vino greco reappears in late medieval and early modern texts from Italy, France, Catalonia,[2] Germany and England.
Curiously, the 14th century Florentine merchant Francesco Pegolotti records in Pratica della mercatura (c. 1340) that vino greco was exported from Italy to Constantinople, the Byzantine Greek capital.
The Italian gastronome Platina, in De honesta voluptate et valetudine (1475), says that the best vino greco was made at San Gimignano (Non improbatur et graecum, maxime vero quod in oppidum Geminianum in Hetruria nascitur), but he is careful to distinguish it from the still-famous Vernaccia di San Gimignano.
Vino greco or wine Greek is described by several authors as being made on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius; one such traveller is the scientist John Ray, writing in 1673.