John 2:1-11 places the episode on the third day of the gospel's opening sequence: Jesus, his mother and his newly called disciples are guests at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. When the wine runs out, an embarrassment for the host family in a culture where hospitality was a matter of honor, Jesus's mother tells him, and he has the servants fill six stone jars, kept for Jewish rites of purification, with water. The water, drawn out and tasted by the steward, is wine, and better wine than what had been served first. John states plainly that this was the first of Jesus's signs, that it manifested his glory, and that his disciples believed in him because of it.
The episode appears only in John. Matthew, Mark and Luke, which share a great deal of material with each other, have no version of it, a pattern John repeats with several of his most distinctive miracle stories. John structures much of his gospel around a sequence of such signs, each one paired with a discourse that draws out its meaning, and Cana stands at the head of that sequence as the first public demonstration of who, in John's telling, Jesus is. The miracle also entered later Christian art and liturgy as a model for nuptial blessing, and Cana itself, a Galilean village whose exact site is debated among archaeologists, remains a place of pilgrimage today for couples seeking a blessing on their marriages.