Greece has been producing wine for thousands of years. But it was only when the economy collapsed that the country found its own style. The crisis as a liberation, followed by a renaissance in wine culture. A model to follow?
Marie-Madeleine Lorantos lights a slim cigarette and points it towards the street outside the bar. “All the shops there were dark,” she says quietly, “every single one.” It is the year 2012, the worst year of the Greek financial crisis. Unemployment and poverty are at their peak – and it is precisely at this moment that she opens the Heteroclito, Athens’ first serious wine bar. But nobody comes. Too unfamiliar, too new, too hard to grasp: a bar in the heart of Syntagma that serves only Greek wine – and not the usual sort you’d find in a taverna, but the other kind. These days, the Heteroclito is ‘the place to be’ when it comes to wine in Athens. There’s now a wine shop too, right next to the bar. And if you want to get a table in the evening, you’d better book early.
Organic winemaker Apostolos Thymiopoulos is regarded in Greece as the star of Xinomavro. He now exports 90 per cent of his production.
ThymiopoulosGreek wine is as old as Europe itself: its earliest traces date back to around 6500 BC, followed by Ottoman rule, the civil war, the post-war cooperatives, and retsina for tourists. When young Greek oenologists returned from the University of Montpellier in the 1980s, they initially planted Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. They believed that what the world knew would sell. That was a mistake. The crisis put an end to it. In 2008, grape prices plummeted. Anyone wanting to sell wine had to export it. And those who did so soon realised that, compared to the rest of the world, Greek Merlot fared rather poorly. Not so Xinomavro. You can’t buy it anywhere else. The name is made up of ‘xino’, meaning ‘acid’, and ‘mavro’, meaning ‘black’. Anyone tasting it for the first time should take their time. High acidity, pronounced tannins, a light colour despite its name, red fruits, sour cherry, a hint of tomato, a touch of olive. Not immediately charming. But with patience and the right producer: unforgettable.
Apostolos Thymiopoulos has resolutely fought against this obscurity. When he took over his father’s vineyard in Naoussa in 2003 – four hectares in northern Greece – Xinomavro was virtually unknown outside the country. No importer was interested in small Greek wineries that nobody knew internationally and which, in any case, could not supply reliable quantities. Thymiopoulos set off anyway. 8,000 bottles in his luggage, no website, no social media presence. “My plan was very simple,” he says, “I wanted to make the best wine in Greece.”
Today he produces over a million bottles, more than 90 per cent of which he sells abroad. “Greek wine isn’t a fad,” he says as we part. “It’s our language. And we’re just learning to speak it better.”
Naoussa is Xinomavro country, almost exclusively so. The appellation covers just 350 hectares, 56 of which are cultivated by Thymiopoulos alone. The climate surprises anyone who thinks of Greece only as islands and summer: more continental than expected, cool enough for genuine freshness.
Greece is not one wine region, but many. Santorini, with its volcanic soils and ungrafted old vines, is a world of its own: the Assyrtiko is salty, taut and long-lived, but its yields are so low that the area under cultivation is slowly dwindling under the pressure of tourism. The Peloponnese produces the most accessible great red wine with Nemea and Agiorgitiko. Crete is discovering Vidiano and Liatiko – varieties that hardly anyone knew about ten years ago. Kefalonia has Robola, citrusy and chalky, which is almost exclusively found there.
More than 350 indigenous grape varieties. Around 30 are cultivated on a significant scale. A source of richness, yet also a challenge to explain.
Panagiotis Papagianopoulos is a quiet man. His Tetramythos vineyard lies at an altitude of 800 to 1,000 metres in the north of the Peloponnese; the vines are old and gnarled, and no tractor can make it up there. To the south, high mountain peaks shield the region from the heat of Africa, whilst cool winds blow in from the Gulf of Corinth. “They always bring a little salt with them from there,” says Papagianopoulos. The wines taste cool, salty and elegant. 330,000 bottles a year – yet he could sell three times that amount.
Nevertheless, he looks to the future with concern. In the past, every year in Greece was good or very good. Then the rain stopped coming. “How much longer can this go on?” he asks. Vicky Aslanis, who runs a vineyard in Macedonia with her sister, knows the solution: “The old grape varieties are clearly better able to cope with the increasingly difficult conditions.”
That is precisely the point where everything comes full circle. Greek wine has the potential to embody two things: an ancient land and a new way of thinking about wine. The crisis has forced winegrowers to use their own grape varieties. The climate is now forcing them to adopt their own methods. And the market is increasingly rewarding what you cannot find anywhere else.
You can’t point to Xinomavro in the same way as you would to Nebbiolo in Italy – even if the parallels are tempting. Assyrtiko is not a Greek Riesling. Anyone who explains Moschofilero by comparing it to Muscat has opened the door, but hasn’t yet stepped inside the room. The names are unwieldy. Getting started requires guidance. And it’s well worth the effort.
At Heteroclito in Athens, there isn’t a single table left on a typical Tuesday evening. Marie-Madeleine Lorantos tastes everything the winemakers pour for her at their tables. If she likes it, she adds it to her range. At the beginning, she had to explain what acidity and tannins are. That’s no longer necessary today. “Greek wine,” she says, “was for a long time a language that nobody wanted to speak.” Now, more and more people are learning it.