Wine-colored sea is a different story, I think. I've seen other languages also describe the sea as red, orange, etc. This is more of a situation with color naming: cultures separate colors on the spectrum into named categories in a more or less consistent way (e.g. blue and green come apart towards the end, and some languages still have the two merged). Red is one of the first colors to be named.
yes, that could be true. but the point still stands, that the repetition of certain phrases, even if they understood colours differently than modern audiences, still served the purpose of aideing memory and familiarity among the storyteller and the audience.
Apparently there is still scholarly debate around this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...