Greek wine is experiencing a renaissance, as new growers, the use of long-forgotten varieties and an export drive have emerged. Read more about it at this edited excerpt from the Financial Times.
Greece’s wine industry has changed dramatically since the mid-1980s. Back then, there were 70 wineries in the country, many owned by local co-operatives that sold wine in bulk to households and restaurants. By 2008 — the year the recession began — that number had risen to 500, and mid-priced Greek wines could be found in specialist wine stores across Europe. As the economy went into free fall, there was explosive growth in new wineries, many on Aegean islands where winemaking had been all but abandoned. More than 1,400 Greek wineries are now in operation.
The FT’s wine columnist Jancis Robinson says of Greek wine today: “You only have to look at a wine list in Greece to see what treasures (and unfamiliar names) it has to offer the curious wine drinker.” Greek wineries produce about 300m litres a year, compared with 650m in Portugal, a similar-sized economy with a long tradition of winemaking. Greece’s wine revenues total some €900m a year, against €1.6bn for Portugal. “The crisis encouraged different kinds of people to try their hand at winemaking and several years of rapid tourist growth gave them a ready-made market,” says Konstantinos Lazarakis, Greece’s first master of wine.
The crisis has also given a push to Greece’s reputation as a maker of high-quality wines. Established producers facing financial pressure ramped up exports, while smaller operations had to sell abroad to survive. “Prices became more competitive and consumers abroad realised just how good Greek wine has become,” says Lazarakis. In the 1990s Greek winemakers believed it was important to work with international varieties such as Cabernet, Syrah and Chardonnay to prove that a Mediterranean newcomer could compete with established New World producers. But as their confidence grew, winemakers began blending local with international varieties, creating distinctive flavours that appealed to local and foreign consumers.
Over the past decade, however, the proportion of Greek to international varieties has been reversed. One reason is that the quality of wine from indigenous grapes improved as winemakers adopted modern cultivation methods, moving to low yields and acquiring new machinery. Terroir has become important, too. Another reason is that many more varieties have entered commercial production as Greek producers explore the country’s exceptionally rich heritage of indigenous wine grapes, following a worldwide trend among growers to recover long-forgotten “exotic” varieties that can produce distinctive new wines.
Greece's promotion efforts are currently behind its four flagship varieties — Agiorgitiko, Xinomavro, Assyrtiko and Moschofilero. Assyrtiko, apart from the volcanic island of Santorini, is also grown in several regions of mainland Greece and has become the first Greek variety to acquire an international reputation: growers in Turkey, South Africa and Australia have planted the drought-resistant vine.
Other varieties have become more widely known; for example Malagousia, a dry white wine grape variety that was on the brink of extinction when it was rediscovered by a professor of oenology in the 1970s. Then there is retsina — a white wine laced with resin from the Aleppo pine as a preservative — which gave Greek winemaking an unenviable reputation for decades. But new retsinas — made from Assyrtiko and the widely grown white wine grape Roditis, rather than the traditional Savatiano grape, and containing only a hint of resin — are popular with many who decried the original version. Meanwhile, the separate qualities of Savatiano, native to the Attica region around Athens, have been rediscovered.
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