Islands beckon the holiday traveller: their watery girdle seems to guarantee inaccessibility. You can’t be reeled back on a whim – as you might, so easily, up a motorway, down a river, from a city of the plain. Europe’s sunnier holiday islands encourage you to nest a bottle of wine among the dirty washing in your case on your way home: Tenerife, Sardinia, Madeira. One insists on it: Santorini. This 73-square-kilometre horseshoe, very nearly the final crumb of the Cyclades, is a wine beacon. Here’s why.
This island, inhabited for at least 4,000 years, was in ancient times called Kalliste, meaning “the best” or “the most beautiful”. A later name was Thera – or Strogili, “the rounded”. It’s a geological remnant today: neither beautiful nor rounded.
Around 3,669 years ago, Thera exploded, killing and burying its Bronze Age community, unleashing a chain of tsunamis, and hastening the demise of nearby Crete’s Minoan civilisation. The explosion was 20 times more powerful than that which destroyed Pompeii, though it was simply the latest in a dozen or so such eruptions over the past 360,000 years: this is an angry pimple on the skin of the Earth. It left a chaotic dump of tephra, pumice and ash covering the crags and back plains that surround the central caldera. This debris – a unique soil medium, undigested by time, austere to look on – gives us a wine like no other, from vines like no other.
Santorini’s vines don’t need to be planted on rootstocks like most European vines: the root-feeding phylloxera louse can’t survive in its ash and pumice. But they need protection against the northern Meltemi winds that flay the island in the summer months, and they need to hoard every drop of the annual 350 millimetres or so of rain. The result is half bird’s nest, half oildrum: a tightly coiled basket of foliage protecting the egg-like grapes within. When the vine needs replacement, the basket is cut away and a new plant regenerated from the ancient root. “We have 80-year-old vines, but the vines have 400-or 500-year-old roots,” the wine-maker Yiannis Paraskevopoulos of Gaia Wines told me when I last visited. “It’s the most historic vineyard on the planet still alive and producing.”
There are a number of different indigenous varieties on the island, but the most important of these is Assyrtiko. Grown in this place and in this way, Assyrtiko produces electrically dry wines that are high in acidity yet stone-dense and satisfying, too. The sea winds leave their salty trace, yet it is above all the sense of mineral profusion they seem to convey, obliterating their fruit profile, which renders them remarkable. Is it the legacy of a centenarian root system trickling down through a mineral underworld – or irresistible autosuggestion?
Generations of islanders have beautified their geological shambles by colonising the caldera edge with white and blue, cubiform buildings. The fact, too, that the caldera faces west means that summer twilight unrolls a carpet of silky gold away to the horizon. As the sea swallows the sun, the gold lifts, filling the air. It’s easy to feel elated as you eat an open-air dinner on Santorini, while a thousand flickering candles begin to light the white terraces all around you.
You won’t be alone, of course: #Santorini has more than 8 million posts on Instagram, many of them triumphant selfies. Climate change and tourism, says Paraskevopoulos, are colossal challenges. The vineyards are protected, “but young Santorinians have an easier, more safe and less dusty way of making far more money through tourism than by growing grapes. So they abandon the profession. No young growers any more. Just old timers.”
Every year, too, brings less rain and more heat, accentuating the island’s agricultural vulnerability: +2.45°C in the past 45 years, with a drop of 135mm of rain over the past 15. The more we visit, the less certain this wine’s future becomes: the 21st-century tourist paradox, in a glass of sour-salt white.
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This article appears in the 25 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special 2024