The Culture of Wine: Greece

Twenty years ago, Greece won the European Championships, a tournament they were predicted to be immediately knocked out of. That’s what usually happens: it was the first and only time the country had come close to winning a major football tournament. This year (2024), a Greek club, Olympiakos, won a European tournament for the first time in the country’s history. Both victories were unexpected, unplanned, and wildly celebrated: out of chaos can come success.

Greece is on the edge of Europe, but also the centre of disputed territories. Its history is long and rich, going back to the Ancient Greeks and the beginnings of democracy and philosophy. Writers such as Plato and Socrates are still cited, thousands of years after they lived. But modern-day Greece is sometimes seen as a madcap Mediterranean country, rural, poor, undeveloped, an off-beat EU aberration, even though it’s at the heart of the historical development of Europe: we may not be drinking wine today if it weren’t for the Greeks.

Greek is the foundation for many, many words in the English language. One of them is Byzantine, a catchword for overly complicated bureaucracy which the Byzantium Empire was associated with. That, in part, led to its downfall and the takeover by the Ottoman Empire from neighbouring Turkey in the 1400s. In the 400 years of Ottoman rule, alcohol sales were prohibited: the only wine made was for home consumption. A wine culture which is the basis of everything we drink now barely functioned until the 1960s onwards.

It wasn’t just the Ottoman occupation. The economy of the Byzantine Empire was haemorrhaghed by Venetian merchants who charged excessive taxes on Greek products, including wine, making the country extremely vulnerable to economic collapse. The ups and downs in Greek history have always been in conjunction with other Mediterranean countries.

Greece finally became independent again in the mid-nineteenth century, but it’s been an uneasy history since then. A military dictatorship ruled the country from 1967 to 1974, when the island of Cyprus was invaded by Turkey, resulting in an uncomfortable truce which leaves Cyprus still separated into two differently governed areas. To the north, it was only a few years ago that Greece and North Macedonia reached an agreement on naming: North Macedonia is a country, Macedonia is a Greek region on the other side of the mountains.

Mountains are a defining feature of the Greek landscape. Continental Greece rises into them, Mount Olympus giving its name to the Olympics. The terrain is rugged, barren, remote, rural. The best wines come from high elevation, because Greece is hot, the large capital city of Athens oppressive in the summer. There’s also the seas, surrounding the continental mainland. The island of Santorini was possibly created by a volcanic eruption that caused the ten plagues of Egypt referenced in the Bible.

The Greek diaspora spreads across the world, to the UK, to the US, to Australia. The Australian show, The Slap, shows a Greek-Australian family in dramatic breakdown. The current manager of Tottenham Hotspur, Ange Postecoglou, in London could be a character from the show. The cities of the U.S. East Coast have many Greek communities. So too on the West Coast: Portland’s wine shops have many Greek wines because of Greek immigrants.

There is a style of wine which inhibits appreciation of Greek wine: retsina. But it also points to Greece’s long history. A wine flavoured with pine resin, retsina goes back to Ancient Greece. The resin was added to preserve wines and protect them from oxidation. As the Romans—who were hugely influenced by Greek culture—advanced across Europe and expanded wine production, oak barrels were used instead. Greek farmers never learnt about this practice, and retsina persisted. It’s still produced, not all of it bad, but it’s not in line with modern wine practices—nor was it 2,000 years ago.

All of this makes it difficult to define and describe Greece, even if there are many stereotypes about Greek culture: smashing plates after a meal, argumentative and Mediterranean, passionate and tanned, the perfect tourist destination, a country both patriarchal and matriarchal, European but on the edge of the continent. There are mountains, there is water, there are almost as many islands as there is history, and there is Assyrtiko which produces some of the finest white wine in the world.

And there is feta cheese, which I could eat endlessly.

listen to the episode on patreon.com

also listen to my five-episode series of interviews with Dionysi Grevenitis