Santorini snapshot and wines to try

It takes a lot to get Santorini’s visitors off their sun loungers. Days on Greece’s most popular island tend to be divided between sunbathing and lunching, always with a view of the world-famous caldera, until it’s time to watch the sun set over Amoudi Bay.

Scroll down for Terry Kandylis’ top 10 Assyrtikos from Santorini

There is one very good reason to go inland, however, and that is to visit Santorini’s wineries. With the exception of Sigalas, all the major producers are in the sheltered southerly part of the island. But then Paris Sigalas is generally something of an exception. Recently he has been training Assyrtiko vines to grow on trellises – something that many producers believe could weaken the intense minerality of the island’s grapes and will certainly spoil the look of their unique landscape.Take a wine drive around this long arc of an island and the first thing that becomes clear is that Santorini doesn’t have vast rolling acres of vines. It has hundreds of small stony fields. And inside those fields the grapes are grown round and round in ‘kouloura’, coiled basketlike structures that rise only a few inches above the ground.

With bakingly high temperatures and virtually no rainfall, Santorini is almost a desert. The success of its wine industry comes down to the triumph of highly resilient fruit and simple, ancient technology.

The grapes of Santorini – there are six main varieties – grow on vines with roots that penetrate deep into a landscape created by volcanic eruption thousands of years ago. To protect those vines on the surface today, each is wound into a kouloura shape, which keeps wind, dust and the worst excesses of the high temperatures at bay.

Volcanic influence

The famous minerality of Santorini’s wines – especially noticeable in its signature Assyrtiko grape – comes from the nutrients that those vines absorb from the volcanic soil. The sea mist that invades the island at night and seeps into the soil also informs the terroir.

All these factors will be explained to you again and again at each vineyard you visit. The young people who work in Santorini’s wine industry are proud of their exceptionalism, although older hands will tell of the backbreaking strain of picking every grape by hand from the kouloura.

The downside of Santorini’s unusual viticulture is cost. According to Markos Kafouros, president of Santo Wines: ‘In 2018, Santorini wine producers paid €4-€5 for a kilo of grapes, while elsewhere in the world machine-harvested grapes might be costing as little as a tenth of that.’

Santo Wines, an island-wide cooperative producing 600,000 bottles a year, is the first stop for many visitors to the island as its sits above the modern harbour of Athinios. Everyone who grows grapes on Santorini is automatically a member of this cooperative, whether they make their own wine, sell to a larger producer, or to Santo Wines itself. Kafouros is proud of the fact that Santo Wines, now in its 71st year, has proved that the cooperative model, often discredited elsewhere in Greece, has proved to be a success on the island.

Elsewhere, the major wineries are a mix of established local initiatives, such as Domaine Sigalas and Hatzidakis – whose wine-growing has become so professional that they now win international prizes – and companies from mainland Greece, including Boutari and Tselepos, who have opened satellite operations on Santorini, drawn by the runaway success of the island’s wine industry.

There are also new winemakers like Yannis Valambous, who recently turned his family’s land into the Vassaltis vineyard. All of these major players on the island – there as many as 15 companies – buy grapes from those who farm smaller holdings.

Petros Vamvakousis, whose Boutari plant produces 350,000 bottles annually, says it can be difficult working with older growers: ‘It is not always easy for them to follow the needs of modern technology. Very often they keep the vines on only out of a sense of tradition.’

Like many of the major producers, Boutari is looking to take over and rent smaller vineyards on Santorini to gain greater control of what is grown and harvested.

See also: Top five Santorini wineries to visit

Scarce resource

Another issue on Santorini is the increasing need to irrigate – something that was never an issue before global warming impacted the Greek islands. ‘We receive two million visitors a year on Santorini,’ says Valambous. ‘But this year only 200mm of rainfall. Even with desalination plants there is hardly enough water for the holidaymakers – and us. Asking the municipality for permission to irrigate would not be possible, so we need to get a permit to dig wells.’

But everyone agrees that, even more than global warming, Santorini’s biggest problem is the lack of land on which to grow enough grapes to meet growing national and international demand. ‘Legislation in 2012 to stop building over agricultural land is not enough,’ says Kafouros. ‘Any building that’s near a vineyard can disturb the grapes. We need zoning. Areas for tourist hotels, areas for citizens and areas for grape production.’

All of Santorini’s major producers know that they could sell far more wine if only they could produce it. The answer has, however, been staring Santorini in the face for tens of thousands of years. Thirassia, the second- largest island in the Santorini archipelago, is sparsely populated, officially part of the Santorini terroir and almost identical in soil and climate, except that it actually receives more hours of sunshine on its extensive western slopes. Moreover, according to Vamvakousis, the population of Thirassia (little more than 300) prefers agriculture over mass tourism. ‘They are conservative people and do not want to see their island going the same way as Santorini.’

Wine excursions

Santo Wines has been harvesting grapes on Thirassia for several decades now, using them mostly for traditional Vinsanto. Next year it may be bottling a Santorini Assyrtiko labelled Thirassia. And Boutari is offering its production facilities on Santorini to a new vineyard on Thirassia called Mikra Thira. In 2019, Vassaltis intends to start planting on Thirassia with a view to harvesting in 2023.

Soon visitors to Santorini will be able to take the ferry across the caldera – passing the eastern Mediterranean’s youngest volcano, Nea Kameni – to visit Thirassia’s wineries. For the moment, however, a number of tour companies take visitors on a full or half-day excursion round Santorini’s vineyards. It’s also very easy for visitors with a hire car and a designated driver to tour the wineries following the maroon ‘Wine Road’ signs.

As well as luring wine lovers away from the tourist hotspots of Oia and Fira, Santorini’s 20km of Wine Road encourage visitors to see the island itself and to talk to the real people of Santorini, rather than the amiable waiter who is over from Athens this summer.

Formerly an award-winning BBC drama producer, Adrian Mourby has published several novels and also works as a journalist, mainly in the fields of opera and travel

Terry Kandylis’ top 10 Assyrtikos from Santorini

Born in Greece, Terry Kandylis is head sommelier at London private members club 67 Pall Mall, and a DWWA judge.

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