Is Greece's wine still worth honouring?

The Olympic Games originated as a festival to honour the gods, including Dionysus, the god of wine. So André Pretorius travelled to Greece to find out whether its wines are still worth honouring.

 

The first tender green vine leaves of the new season were sprouting around me. Olive and cypress trees framed the vineyard to create a picture of Arcadian beauty. Far below, the Aegean Sea glistened brightly in the late afternoon sun. On the hill overlooking the vineyard, some dilapidated monastic buildings stood sentry, crowned by the green onion dome of a church.

I could view this scene only because I have a Y chromosome. For this was Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain of Orthodox Christianity. Women - even female farm animals - have been banned from Athos, the monastic republic in northeast Greece, since an imperial Byzantine decree in the 11th century.

The vineyards are leased to the firm of Tsantali by the Russian monks of St Panteleimon monastery - one of 20 on the peninsula. Yiannis Rannos, an agronomist with Tsantali, had driven me from the company headquarters near Thessaloniki.

In the vineyards there was the usual early season activity, but that was one of the few "usual" thing about these vineyards. "The monks are not always easy to deal with," laughed Rannos, referring to current negotiations to renew the lease. "Hopefully we can change the clause that requires grapes to be removed by boat rather than through the land border," he said.

Tsantali is the only commercial winemaker active on the Holy Mountain. And it is as if Providence had decreed that the company should make wine from this blessed plot. In 1971 Evangelos Tsantalis was one of the thousands of Greek men who still seek the Byzantine peace of the mountain every year. He was caught up in a storm and sought sanctuary with the monks of a dependency of St Panteleimon, called Chromitsa. When the storm cleared, he found a vineyard no longer tended by the depleted community of monks.

It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair between Tsantalis and the monks of Athos: the company would tend this unique vineyard under strict conditions and be allowed also to make some wine for itself. Yet, as with most worthwhile things in life, it has required hard work. "When we took over the vineyard, such vines as there were, were not trellised - they were wild bush vines and in a bad condition," explains Rannos.

Since then, most of the 80 hectares of vineyard have been replanted with a mixture of varieties, both indigenous (Xinomavro, Limnio, Assyrtiko and Athiri) and international. But some older plots that are past their best remain a pressing concern and re-planting can only proceed once the new contract is in place.

Even if the vicissitudes of the Athos way is temporarily frustrating Tsantali's plans, the concern with improving vineyard quality is part of the greater Tsantali strategy. The company has spent millions of euros on modernising its three wineries and the next stage in the pursuit of greater quality is improved vineyard management, according to the head winemaker, Pavlos Argyropoulos.
The - literally - otherworldly location of the Athos vineyards gives them a unique place in the Tsantali portfolio. Their seclusion, says Rannos, has enabled the company to adopt an organic approach to vineyard management.

And being the only maker of wine from the Holy Mountain gives it a unique commercial advantage, explains Perikles Drako, Tsantali's export manager.

A winetasting reveals that Tsantali's collaboration with the monks has created much more than peculiar oddities with curiosity value. The red Metoxi blend marries the Old World - Cabernet Sauvignon - with the even older world - the local Limnio grape. It is marketed as something of a flagship grand vin for the company. And this almost black wine with its spicy nose (Limnio's signature), its lush texture and its Cabernet Sauvignon nobility may lead the Tsantali fleet to new ports.

The barrel-fermented white Chromitsa from the shadow of the eponymous monastic outpost is a similar blend of Greek and foreign. The minerals, citrus and honey flavours of the Assyrtiko complement typical Chardonnay characteristics and serve as a foil to the flowery excess of the Athiri.

Of another of the Athos reds, Jancis Robinson recently wrote: "It has lovely sweet, supple fruit and really glamorous all-comer appeal - [like] a good-quality Californian Cabernet."

But Tsantali is one of Greece's biggest wine producers and its range stretches far beyond the singular slopes of the Holy Mountain. It encompasses a wide array of appellations as far afield as the Peloponnese peninsula in the south to Macedonia and Naoussa in the north, from indigenous Greek and international varieties, and across price points and styles from retsina to ouzo.

Some of these are an acquired taste - a foreign palate needs at least two years to get used to the pine resin taste of retsina, joked Drako.

To me the real revelation from the Tsantali range was the Pinot Noir-like Xinomavro, a traditional Greek grape that underpins Tsantali's fine Rapsani Epilegmenos and gives it a delicious leathery nose. The Rapsani vineyards on the slopes of the mythical home of the ancient Greek gods, Mount Olympus, give Tsantali another unique selling point - a sort of pagan balance to the holy wines of Athos.

But despite all these unique selling points, Greek wine has to compete in a very tough market. Drako laments that his countrymen missed the opportunity of creating a national marketing programme for Greek wine in time for the current Olympic Games in Athens. He is right: an opportunity like the Olympics will not arise again for a generation.

And the connection between wine and the Olympics is perhaps less fanciful than it appears at first. Olympia and the ancient Games commenced life as a shrine and a festival in honour of the gods, one of whom, of course, was Dionysus (whose Roman incarnation was Bacchus).

Greece may be the mythical birthplace of wine, but the ancient Greeks' invention - like its other great product, democracy - has outgrown its cradle. If the fractious wine industry of modern Greece wants to capitalise on the legacy of the ancients, it needs a national marketing campaign. It is fighting the image of decades of indifferent wines.
Drako admits that until 20 years ago there were probably only three or four good wines in the whole of Greece.

At the same time it has to face such prosaic challenges as the fact that few foreign tongues can get around the Greek wine names. Anyone who has ever heard a British accent battling its way through Vergelegen will know what the Greeks are up against.

Greek winemakers also face a balancing act between being Greek and being international. As one British wine merchant put it: "Why would anyone risk buying a Greek Chardonnay?"

Even at home in Greece, it is a battle that is being won only slowly. My week in Greece brought a succession of unpalatable retsinas and wines served from plastic five litre bottles. Occasionally the dreary procession was lit up by something more interesting, like the pleasant Boutari Merlot my friends opened after the midnight church service on Easter Saturday.

But my most singular Greek wine experience came in one of the Athonite monasteries. The monks' production is more distinguished by its holiness than its taste - Drako told me how he once donated some barrels to the monastery of Xenophontos, where his uncle is abbot, to try and improve the quality of their awful wine.

Yet sometimes there is more to wine than taste. On the Sunday I had to leave Athos, I set off from the monastery of Grigoriou at 7am. It was raining. I faced four hours of hard walking to Dafni from where the only daily boat leaves at 11.30. I half-crawled the 300m uphill from the sea to the majestic walls of the monastery of Simonopetra an hour later.

A young monk in a long black habit greeted me. In hope more than expectation, I asked about a lift to Dafni. Yes, the workers' bus would go soon. But they had just finished church - would I like to stay for lunch?

A lift to Dafni, lunch at 8am: truly, on this Holy Mountain, prayers do not go unanswered.

After the guests had settled in the frescoed dining room, the monks chanted while the blue-robed abbot entered in procession. The food was like the manna to the Israelites - not tasty in itself, but beatified by its time and place: a spinach stew, a vegetable broth with dumplings and a chunk of feta cheese, eaten as an elderly monk read the lesson of the day.

And wine. Red wine in a tin cup. It had the colour of deep humility and sacrifice, a nose of pure divinity, unrestrained charity on the palate and a finish that stayed with me as the boat bobbed back to secular Greece.