There was wine in China when he was in Shennong and Huangdi. According to "Bao Puzi", "The Yellow Emperor made Jiuquan method, using Qumi as an elixir". Compared with wine, the legendary tea appeared almost long ago and was also discovered in Shennong era. "Shennong Materia Medica" contains, "Shennong tastes a hundred herbs to cure diseases, and meets 72 poisons a day, and treats them with tea." Tea and tea communication are variants of tea before tea in Tang Materia Medica, which were recorded in detail by Su Gong and Wuji during the reign of Tang Xianqing.

The earliest connection between tea and wine was in the Three Kingdoms period. According to "The History of the Three Kingdoms, Wu Shu and the Biography of Wei Yaochuan", "When Yao ... first saw different gifts, it was often to cut down or give tea cups as wine" and "Tea cups as wine" appeared. In Wei Yao's biography, tea is used as wine. There is a saying in the book "The Reflection of the Three Kingdoms, Qin Zi" that "drinking without getting drunk is tasteless like tea", that is, comparing the drinking situation to drinking tea. Since then, Guo's Guang Zhi in the Western Jin Dynasty has described that "Cornus bazi belongs to a genus, and it is called tea when it is decocted with paste, or when Cornus officinalis cooks gastric juice in the chest. If it is red, it is also decocted with rice paste, which is called' non-alcoholic tea'", meaning that tea is used as non-alcoholic wine, and tea is also used instead of wine.

Because a long time ago, wine, as a carrier of ceremony, became a common drink of all social strata. When tea is associated with wine as a drink, it is regarded as an equivalent or substitute of wine. When talking about tea and wine, the two sides are often compared. Moreover, people quickly and objectively saw the characteristics and differences between tea and wine, and found that they have different qualities and functions in life: "You can know the strength of wine when you are worried, and you can see the merits of tea when you are asleep", "Picking flowers to make wine in the spring, burning bamboo and frying tea and staying at home at night", that is, wine is freed from people and gives people with different mental states different comfort.