I will be as brief as is possible when I talk about wine, as many books have been written about the subject and my interest in this instance is only in the fact that wine was an integral part of Greek life – in history, myth and legend. It was considered a gift from the gods and they even had a god of wine, Dionysus, and festivals were held in the winter months honouring him through the performing arts.
Wine making came to Greece most likely via Caucasia and the Middle East, everything I read points to a lot of confusion about the chronology of its arrival in Greece. A stone foot press has been found in a Minoan villa on Crete, dated 1600 BC. The sophistication of the site suggests that production had most likely been going on for sometime.
Trying to thread the story of wine making from the ancients to today is like a labyrinth in speculation via archaeology, history, myth and legend. What we do know though is that the ancient Greeks established Greek states in Southern France, Massalia, later Marseilles, the Iberian Peninsula, Southern Italy – which became Magna Gracia (Greater Greece) where till today the Greek language is spoken in a variety of dialects – north Africa, Asia Minor, and further to the east, southern Russia and Georgia where we know they took their knowledge of wine culture. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder described 91 varieties of grapes and 50 kinds of wine.
When the Romans came to power they were sufficiently appreciative of Greek culture to adopt and embrace most of its heritage, including its alphabet, elements of Hellenic language, its deities, ideas concerning government and education, and – with great gusto – wine.
Through all the speculation of vine varieties, and what came via the Greeks, the one thing that seems to be unanimous is that ancient Greece can be credited with the elevation of wine to a cultural phenomenon: a technical mastery of wine production – a sophisticated prototype level of commerce all these having had a profound effect on Western notions of wine and culture.
In a highly developed Epicurean culture, practices such as watering down wine with water and sometimes seawater, adding other ingredients such as honey and spices was the norm. While attending a seminar on ancient Greek gastronomy at The Polytechnic University of Athens in 1995, it was put by the lecturer that undiluted wine was punishable by death and only by doctor’s permission was the drinking of undiluted wine allowed, information I have tried to cross reference. As harsh as this punishment might sound to us today, we have to take into consideration that these were the days before distillation. We also must learn not to consider cultures from the past with a 21st century sensibility.
According to the head of the Greek Vitis Database Project at the University of Crete, (European cultivars), Dr Kaliopi Angelakis-Roubelakis, the Iberian Peninsular is most likely to be Greek offspring. But I note that in Italy many are classified as Greek for example, Greca di Velletri, Grecale, Grecanico Dorato, Grecau Niuru, Grechetto Bianco, Grechetto Nero di Todi, Grechettoe Rosso, Greco Bianco, Greco Bianco di Novara, Greco Bianco di Tuffo, Greco Nero and Greco Nero di Consenza all seem to hark back to a period of Greek colonisation.
Much has happened in history and time for Greece to loose its way in wine making over the centuries and for this, one has to read Greece’s traumatic history past and present. Roman conquest, Dark ages, the rise of Byzantium, the Crusades, raids by the varying nomadic Turkish tribes, the last being the Ottomans hence the Ottoman Empire, Liberation in the 1800’s, WWI, the destruction of the Greeks in Asia Minor soon after and the creation of millions of refugees, ’30s fascism, WWII, followed by civil war that ended in 1949, poverty hence mass migration to USA, Australia in the the’50s and ’60s, fascism from 1967 to 1975 and the exodus of workers to Germany, Belgium and other European countries while the educated and middle class fled the dictatorship to countries where they were allowed to think, work and have an opinion. All this leaving Greece drained of its people and its cohesion of thought, therefore affecting progress.
Even though there was a very small local wine production in the ’60s it was only in ’70s that we could say that Greece started growing its industry with its entrance into the European Union. A lot has happened since and in a very short time span but I will leave the details for those that are curious enough to explore the subject on their own.
The regions of superior quality wines being produced today in Greece are as follows. In Northern Greece, the region of Macedonia, Epirus, Goumenitsa, and Thessaly. In the south is Peloponnesus. The west Ionian Sea Island of Cephalonia. The Aegean islands most famous for wine making today are, Lemnos, Samos, Paros, Santorini, Rhodes and Crete.
My all time favourite is the white from Santorini. It produces an extraordinary white assyrtiko, considered to be Greece’s best white wine grape and recently named one of the top 100 best whites in the world.
Santorini is the famous Greek island with the live volcano in the Aegean in the Cycladic group of Islands, just north of Crete. It has a unique environment for viticulture, perhaps the most unique in the world. A volcanic island, it suffered a catastrophic eruption in 1500 BC approximately, leaving a huge, submerged caldera where the centre of the island had been, creating a geological feature singular to Greece and maybe to the world. Chalk and shale beneath ash, lava and pumice, all contribute to the stress that makes vines, produce the extraordinary fruit. Vines grow on the eastern slopes of the caldera’s edge, beginning at 1000 feet ending at sea level and meeting the island’s black beaches making this impossible to over farm. Necessity dictates double traditional spacing and together with the lack of water creates more stress. Apart from a little rain in winter there is no rain during the rest of the year and desalinated water is the water used by the island’s inhabitants and tourists in the summer. There is no water for the vines during growing time but the vines have a very unique way finding their own water by drinking the moisture absorbed by the ground at night, a quirk of it’s geology and its climate which provide for the vines the bare minimum resulting in high sugar levels. The wind being so relentless an ancient method has been used to grow the vines by training them in a “Stefani” (crown), like a round basket where the grapes hang on the inside and are protected from the wind, keeping in mind that these are the low lying type of vines.