“The first sip of Assyrtiko in the day is something fearsome to behold.”
-Leta Paraskevopoulos, Gai’a
Santorini is a tourist island. Seriously, check your insta for #santorini: flying dress photo shoots, Oia sunsets, drunk catamaran cruises, youth (sorta) wasted on the young. I love visiting islands. European ones with vineyards and volcanos, especially. They feel like continents in microcosm, ships in glass bottles, slow countdowns, tiny reminders of how vast the world is and how finite our own lives are. At night, there are electric lights tumbling into the sea, then a moonlit nothingness that spans eternity. Bomb blasts sprung from the waves. We each become our own Columbus, or Zarko, or Magellan, eyeing the abyss, downing one last dram of strong subtropical wine, mustering courage, venturing forward, uncertain but gallant, alive. Go down fighting, they say. Or at least be in charge of the fighting.
Santorini is also one of the world’s most convincing arguments for terroir. Some of today’s grape varieties have existed on—and adapted to—Santorini for thousands of years, and some may even predate the volcanic eruption. Behind the island’s current wealth and glitzy tourism are long centuries of toil and successive waves of foreign culture. Phoenicians, Spartans, Venetians, Turks, and modern Greeks each planted their flags here. All cultivated, or permitted cultivation, of the vine—the kouloura basket training system used for Assyrtiko today likely arrived with seafaring Phoenicians before the birth of Christ. Real terroir is not a matter of matching a variety to a hospitable environment; it’s allowing a variety to synergize with its environment over a long arc of time. Burgundy has it. German Riesling has it. So does Assyrtiko on Santorini. The things about Santorini Assyrtiko that exemplify typicity—its thick skins, low yields, high acidity, high alcohol, neutral aromatics, and robust phenolics—are signatures of its slow adaptation to this naturally hostile environment.
The first thing you feel is the wind. It’s constant. On the caldera rim, waiters drape fleeces over their diners at sunset, the island’s few trees sway and creak, and hair flies sideways. The wind is fucking fierce; it defines the landscape. The second thing is the heat of the sun. It’s omnipresent. It bakes the flesh of human and grape alike. An occasional cloud dissipates with little fanfare. The third factor is the island’s aridity: on this windy, sun-drenched caldera, there is no rain and no source of fresh water. Summers are completely dry; annually the island receives about 12 inches of precipitation. Sun + Rain + Scant Rainfall define the environment of Santorini. What grows here? Caper bushes, cherry tomatoes, favas, and grapevines. Most crops cannot.
The traditional vine-training system of the island, the kouloura, defends the vine from wind and sun while maximizing its ability to retain water. It’s a remarkable system for three reasons: one, the basket vine is protected from wind; two, the basket vine is within sipping distance of the caldera mist; and three, the fruit remains shaded from the sun. In the old days, vineyard workers would leave their lunches within the wreaths of kouloura vines—they kept the food cool! Nowadays, the kouloura is often cut back near the root system, and the kouloura vineyard today is not the basket shape of yore. In past decades (and centuries), growers would “weave” the baskets for years. Today, the Assyrtiko kouloura is aggressively pruned; the basket woven from a young cane.
Despite the sun and wind, Santorini’s evening air turns dense with humidity. The heat of the volcano conjures mist from the water. Porous pumice stones and aspa sands capture this precious water, and the vine survives the rainless summers of Santorini. Paradoxically, this sunniest and windiest of growing environments encourages mold. Organic viticulture remains a low priority for growers. Elemental sulfur dusts the vines and turns the sky into haze.
Let’s talk soil for a minute. There is none, basically. When the volcano erupted (around 1630 BCE), it ruptured the caldera walls. It separated the islands of Santorini (Thira) and Thirassia. It blew a hole in the Mediterranean, destroyed the Minoan civilization on Crete, and inspired stories of Biblical plagues. It covered the island in a lot of volcanic material. (Seriously, it’s the second-largest eruption in human history.) The black basalt caldera walls, the pockmarked white pumice, and the red rocks of Santorini are the reminders of the explosion. There is limestone bedrock, buried deep beneath the volcanic material, that juts up at the highest elevations of Profitis Illias. But for vineyards, it’s all volcano. The pumice, and the ground-up white aspa sands derived from pumice, are most important for vineyards because they store water. The black basalt rocks have a role, too: they retain heat and allow grapevines to generate sugar through respiration (check this – MS) at night. In all of this, there is very little organic material and very little clay. The lack of clay keeps the island safe from phylloxera, and deep vine roots hold parched sands together when the wind howls.
The largest concentration of vineyards sits in a band of wide basalt terraces between the traditional villages of Megalochori and Pyrgos, from the caldera to the lower slopes of Profitis Ilias, the island’s highest point. The island’s best vineyards, however, might be on the south side of the mountain, where higher elevations keep them cooler, and the full force of northern gales is blunted.
There are dozens of grape varieties indigenous to the island. But only a handful remain in commercial production: Assyrtiko, Aidani, Athiri, Mavrotragano, and Mandilaria. Most of the island’s vineyards have been steadily converted to Assyrtiko since Boutari and Sigalas started paying growers more for the grape in the 1980s and ‘90s. Since 2019, the PDO requires a minimum 85% Assyrtiko in the Santorini blend. Aidani is permitted in the PDO dry wines, but most wineries use it as a vinsanto blending component or, increasingly, as a promising varietal wine in its own right. Aidani has lower acidity, more phenolic bitterness and more intense aromas than Assyrtiko. Athiri, once valued as a blending partner for Assyrtiko, has lost enthusiasm and respect. (For example, Sigalas’ “AA” blend once contained Assyrtiko and Athiri; now it stands for Assyrtiko and Aidani.)
Assyrtiko is, for me, the clearest example of terroir expression in the world. It is also a paradox: a hot-climate white wine that demonstrates lower pH than most German Riesling. The grape is naturally high in tartaric acid, but it maintains acidity here better than anywhere else. The answer to this hot-climate conundrum comes from the sea: potassium levels in vineyard soil lower total acidity in fermenting wines, but the vine’s root system selectively intakes sodium before absorbing potassium. Salt, in this windswept island environment, is everywhere. In no other region, be it Greece or California, can Assyrtiko cut so deeply.
I like the comparison to Riesling. Assyrtiko is easily one of the world’s longest-lived and most “mineral” white wines, and it can produce compelling wines in a range from bone-dry to supremely sweet. It develops something akin to a “petrol” character with age. Unlike Riesling, however, Assyrtiko is quite neutral aromatically, especially in youth. It is all structure—acid and phenolics and alcohol—and very little aroma. Citrus, stone, faint peach… these are the notes of young Assyrtiko, and those could basically describe every white wine ever. The expression of terroir in Assyrtiko comes from its acid, its high levels of alcohol, and its nearly tannic nature—I can’t think of another white grape variety that achieves such intensity in all three structural categories. Add a salty edge, and you have something real fierce to reckon with.
With age, Assyrtiko comes alive. The acid rounds out, and browned toast, diesel, and mineral character comes out. (A dream tasting for me is a 10-year-old flight of GG Riesling, single-vineyard Assyrtiko, premier cru Chablis, and top Hunter Semillon.)
The island’s two principal red grapes, Mavrotragano and Mandilaria, are not permitted in PDO wines. Mavrotragano (“black cruncy”) is the first grape harvested on Santorini, early in August. Haridamos Hatzidakis and Paris Sigalas were early champions.
Today, there are 22 wineries operating on the island. This is a slight increase from the 14 or 15 that operated in 2014, but a far cry from the 300 canavas that existed over a century ago. The vineyard landscape has also contracted. Today, there are 1,200 ha of vineyards on the island, down from 2,500 ha in 1985. Nowadays, growing grapes is a side-gig: growers may have inherited vineyards from their folks, but their primary work might be in tourism, or something else. Many older vineyards are abandoned or go without necessary replanting. The whole island bemoans the encroachment of tourism, but Spyro Lemanis of Sigalas can’t remember the last time a vineyard sold. The threat of international hotel groups buying up vineyard land is at the forefront of everyone’s mind, but that doesn’t seem to be the real problem. It’s the nature of grape-growing as a part-time job: it’s not anyone’s first priority.
