Santorini

The Minoan eruption of Thera registered a volcanic explosivity index of 7 and ejected roughly 28 to 41 cubic kilometres of dense-rock equivalent. It destroyed the Minoan settlement at Akrotiri and struck communities and farmland on nearby islands and the coast of Crete with subsequent earthquakes and tsunamis. The caldera that visitors photograph at sunset is the hole that eruption left; the vineyard soil is what fell back down.

The date is genuinely unsettled, and the two camps must be read separately. The conventional statement is that the eruption devastated Thera circa 1600 BC. But archaeological dating, built on typological sequencing and Egyptian chronology, runs significantly younger than the radiocarbon age — by roughly a century. A 2023 radiocarbon study of a Therasia olive shrub reports 1610–1510 BC at 95.4 per cent confidence. Anyone quoting a single year for this eruption is quoting one school.

Ungrafted vines make vine age meaningful in a way it rarely is elsewhere. Archaeological evidence supports vine cultivation on Santorini going back almost 5,000 years, and on today's estates the plants themselves are old: Estate Argyros reports an average vine age above 70 years, with its oldest parcels more than two centuries old. These are original root systems, continuously renewed above ground, not replacements grafted onto imported stock.

The commercial rise of Santorini's white is documented year by year in the cooperative's own milestone list. Santorini Assyrtiko and Santorini Nykteri acquired the protected designation of origin under EU legislation in 1971. The first PDO Santorini wine bottled under the Santo Wines brand followed in 1985. A new winery opened at Pyrgos in 1993 with a wine promotion centre attached — the appellation and the visitor economy arriving within a decade of each other.

Two houses claim a first, and the page keeps them apart. Santo Wines dates the first PDO Santorini bottling under its own brand to 1985. Domaine Sigalas states that the 1991 Santorini was Paris Sigalas's maiden vintage and the first wine to be labelled protected designation of origin, marking the start of the domaine. Both statements come from the producers themselves; they are recorded here with their owners rather than merged into one origin story.

The American breakthrough was funded and deliberate. In 2009 the cooperative launched an eight-year promotional campaign, Wines from Santorini, in the American market, co-funded by the EU, with the stated objective of introducing Santorini as a premium-quality brand. A second three-year campaign, Santorini Volcanic Terroir, followed in 2018 for wine, fava and tomataki. Today about 70 per cent of the PDO vineyard is planted to Assyrtiko — demand rewrote what the island plants.

Vinsanto's fame has a date attached. Wines of Greece records that Vinsanto's reputation reaches back to the 12th century, but it did not acquire true fame until after 1783, when it journeyed to Russia's large markets. The name itself is read as vino di Santorini — the wine of Santorini — a reading that ties the label to the island's Italian-speaking trading centuries rather than to a saint.

Vinsanto also anchors the island's wine culture in ritual and record. The intangible-heritage listing names Santorini, Nykteri and Vinsanto together as the island's PDO wines, made under the kouloura or ambelia cultivation systems. A sweet wine that travelled to Russia by ship, that carried an Italianate trade name through centuries of foreign rule, and that only received legal protection in 2002, is the island's history compressed into one bottle.

Santorini is the first protected designation of origin wine region in Greece to be included in the National Index of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The distinct vineyard cultivation methods, together with the wine traditions of Thera and Therasia, entered the index at the beginning of 2018. The move was explicitly framed as a step toward a UNESCO listing, on the model of European wine regions that have used heritage status to secure the viability of their vineyards.

The paperwork has a timeline and named authors. The effort followed an international symposium held on the island in 2015 by the UNESCO department of culture and traditions of wine at the University of Burgundy. In February 2017 the application, with extensive audiovisual material and bibliography, went to the ministry of culture and sports; it was approved by the national scientific committee in February 2018. The team were oenologists Nikos Varvarigos and Ioanna Vamvakouri with communications specialist Krystallia Papaeconomou.

The island's wine has been organised collectively for over a century. The Union of Santorini Cooperatives began in 1911 as the Santorini Vine & Wine Protection Fund, took its present form in 1947, and today counts 1,200 active members — the largest organisation on the island, representing its cultivators. Its milestone list doubles as an appellation chronology: PDO for Assyrtiko and Nykteri in 1971, the first branded PDO bottling in 1985, a new winery at Pyrgos in 1993, PDO for Vinsanto in 2002.

PDO Santorini is a trilogy, not a single wine: the dry Santorini, the riper oak-aged Nykteri and the sun-dried sweet Vinsanto, all made under the island's kouloura or ambelia cultivation. The dry wines are Assyrtiko-led and may take up to 15 per cent Athiri and Aidani; Nykteri requires a minimum 13.5% abv and three months in oak. About 70 per cent of the PDO vineyard is planted to Assyrtiko.

Santorini's harvest is early and entirely manual. Picking is among the two or three earliest in Greece, generally starting in the first half of August, because the vines are stressed and the sugars arrive fast. Because of the training systems and the terrain, every aspect of the vine-growing process, from pruning to harvesting, must be carried out by hand. There is no mechanised option here: the basket that protects the fruit also blocks the machine.

What the explosion left is the growing medium. The island's soil, known as aspa, is a mixture of volcanic ash, pumice stone, pieces of solidified lava and sand. It carries little to no organic matter but is rich in essential minerals — with one crucial exception, potassium, whose scarcity produces wines with naturally low pH and high acidity. The acidity that defines Santorini's whites is therefore a chemical consequence of the eruption, not a stylistic choice.

The same porosity governs the island's water. Rain averages only 400 mm a year, falls mostly in winter, and seeps through the porous soil and rock to gather deep in the earth until summer heat draws it back toward the surface. Pumice behaves as a store rather than a barrier. A vineyard that would be desert farming on clay is merely very hard farming on ash, and that difference is the whole agricultural history of Santorini.

Phylloxera destroyed most of Europe's vineyards in the late nineteenth century and forced the survivors onto grafted American rootstock. Santorini was spared for a physical reason: the lack of clay in the soil gives the vines a natural immunity from phylloxera. The result is that this vineyard is one of the few in the world that is ungrafted and untouched by phylloxera, with a historical presence of 3,500 years on the island.

Old vines are kept productive by amputation. As a basket ages its yields fall until the whole structure is cut off at the root, near the surface of the soil — generally done when the baskets approach 75 years of age. A new shoot rises from a dormant eye on the surviving rootstock, is rewoven into a basket, and produces a harvest within two or three years. The root can be millennia-old lineage while the visible vine is a toddler.

The technique is precise and manual. Experienced vine dressers weave the canes of the vine into the shape of a large wreath-like basket which rests on the island's volcanic soil; once fruiting begins, the grapes grow sheltered within their woven baskets. The point is not decoration but yield security in a place where the wind decides how much fruit survives. Santorini's basket vines are visible from the roadside across the island's interior.

Structurally, the vine carries itself. It is not tied to any pole; the shoots are intertwined around the trunk and branches to form a circle, and the plant grows remarkably close to the ground, at no more than 10–20 centimetres. Three agronomic consequences follow, all documented by the Volcanic Agriculture of Europe project: the system reduces waste of water supply, ensures greater exposure of the leaves to the sun, and lowers the need for phytosanitary treatments.

The basket answers four specific hazards. Wines of Greece lists them: strong winds that gather momentum in spring as budding begins, volcanic sand which lashes the vines as it is carried and swirled by the wind, the scorching summertime sun, and the lack of water and moisture except for the nocturnal sea mist. The scale of the wind problem is not rhetorical — gusts here have been known to blow down trellised vineyards in a matter of minutes.

Not every variety gets the same treatment. The kouloura is used for the whites Assyrtiko, Aidani and Aithiri and for the reds Mavrotragano and Mandilaria. Producers describe the goal as an engineered microclimate: the vine is protected from strong winds and intense sunlight while the soil's natural moisture is used to maintain humidity balance under the island's extremely dry conditions. The basket is a shelter and a humidity trap at once.

The island's second system is the ring. In kladeftiko the trunks reach a height between 20 and 30 cm and pruners leave three to five shoots per vine stock, tied around the branches to form small rings like bracelets hanging vertically above the ground. It is used in areas less exposed to wind because the system is more sensitive, and it is combined with late pruning and tying, carried out deliberately to delay budding.

The island's largest private owner runs against the postcard. Estate Argyros states that the vast majority of the estate vines is trained in koulouri, since its architecture allows for better control over the canopy and a finer balance between fruit and vegetation — while accepting that kouloura is the only choice for vineyards extremely exposed to wind, such as those at Akrotiri. Two systems, one island, and a working disagreement about which makes better wine.

The counter-position is stated just as plainly. Hatzidakis preserves the kouloura pruning system across all the vineyards it manages, and publishes the arithmetic: selecting only two to three canes for the formation of the new kouloura reduces yield to 200–300 kg per stremma. That is roughly two to three tonnes per hectare of fruit, which lines up with the region-wide picture of normal yields near 20 hl/ha and often below 10.

The island's second water supply is atmospheric. Beyond the 400 mm of winter rain, the only other source of water available comes in the form of sea fog that envelops the island at night, produced by the reaction of the active volcano with the surrounding sea. The mist is absorbed by soil, pumice and volcanic rock and returned to the vines during the day, when it is needed most — a daily transfer with no pump and no pipe.

The same sea that supplies the water also seasons the fruit. The salty spray that covers the grapes is described by the growers' union as adding another dimension, boosting minerality and giving a pleasing, slightly briny character to the wine. Meanwhile the cool northern meltemi drops night temperatures sharply in summer, which helps preserve the bright acidity that Assyrtiko and the other native varieties already possess.

Wind also does the spraying schedule's job. Those revitalising winds keep the vines from becoming infected with botrytis and mildew, which greatly reduces the need to treat the vines — which is why many growers farm to organic standards without certification. The meltemi is a danger to sailors and an asset to farmers: constant air circulation wards off rot and disease while lowering temperatures and slowing ripening.

The modern rule is narrower than the tradition. Vinsanto is crafted from at least 51 per cent Assyrtiko blended with other local varieties, among them gaidouria, katsano, moschato aspro, monemvasia, platani, potamisi and roditis. The grapes are sun-dried before pressing, which concentrates both sugar and acid. Vinsanto acquired the Santorini PDO under EU legislation in 2002 — three decades after the dry wines were protected.

The vineyard is shrinking, and the growers publish the figures themselves. There is an estimated 1,400 hectares of vineyards still under cultivation on Santorini, down from 2,500 hectares planted in the 1960s. The union attributes the loss to a combination of the island's popularity as a travel destination and the increasing disinterest of new generations of growers, because of the extreme difficulty of vineyard maintenance. Two causes, one direction of travel.

Two vineyard numbers circulate and they measure different things. SevenFifty Daily reports that the vineyards of PDO Santorini span approximately 1,200 hectares, mostly family-owned and extending to neighbouring Thirasia. The Union of Santorini Cooperatives reports about 1,400 hectares still under cultivation island-wide. The first counts the appellation, the second counts the farming. Quoting either without naming which is the fastest way to get Santorini's scale wrong.

The economics explain the pressure. The law allows yields of up to 55 hl/ha, but these are rarely if ever reached: an abundant harvest could turn in close to 40 hl/ha, normal yields are closer to 20, and often dip below 10. Estate Argyros puts its own average on a plentiful vintage at rarely higher than 21 hl/ha. A hectare of Santorini vines produces a fraction of what a hectare of hotel produces, every single year.

Protection has been extended beyond wine to the island's other stressed crops. Santorini fava took its protected designation in 2010 and the Santorini tomato, tomataki, in 2013 — both grown in the same aspa, under the same water regime, by the same families. The cooperative promotes the three together as a volcanic-terroir package. For a vineyard losing hectares to construction, a legally protected food economy is the same defence by another route.

Estate Argyros structures its visit around the vineyard rather than the terrace. All its wine tours include time spent in the vineyards and the production side of the winery, followed by a tutored tasting of the estate wines, including Vinsanto, with artisanal cheeses and cold cuts. Given that the estate's own average yield rarely exceeds 21 hl/ha on a plentiful vintage, the vineyard walk is the part of the visit that explains the price of the bottle.

Two practical caveats belong on any Santorini wine plan. First, the producers publish reservation channels rather than standard tasting prices, so the fee is confirmed at booking, not in advance on the website. Second, August is harvest — the earliest in Greece — which is also the island's most crowded month, so cellar staff are working the crush while the terraces are full. Book ahead and ask what is open.

The visiting economy is younger than the vineyard and openly commercial. Venetsanos, built into the caldera cliff, sells itself as the first industrial winery on the island and pairs a tasting with a light lunch. Estate Argyros sends visitors into the vineyard and the production hall before a tutored tasting with artisanal cheeses and cold cuts. Both take reservations; neither publishes a walk-in tariff, which is worth knowing before you plan a day around them.

Paris Sigalas came to wine from mathematics. His domaine describes him as the pioneering winemaker who applied mathematics to oenology and viticulture, working from his grandfather's vineyard on the plain outside Oia. The wines that followed took Assyrtiko into a market that had no category for it — which is why, tasted blind, dry Assyrtiko from Santorini is almost always said to come from a northerly climate.

The house description of the finished wine is specific rather than lyrical. Wines of Greece writes that Vinsanto displays an amber-brown colour and, although overtly sweet, holds a balance due to its high acidity levels, with aromas reminiscent of dried fruits, honey, caramel, coffee, nuts and spices. The same account notes the wine carries over 40 oz/gal of unfermented sugar — the acidity is what keeps that from reading as syrup.

The clearest statement of the pressure comes from a producer, not a campaigner. Estate Argyros, describing its own holding of more than 120 hectares as a four-generation investment, writes that the magnitude of the commitment is only understandable given that in Santorini there are numerous, far more lucrative uses of land readily available, and, sadly, more frequently preferred. Keeping vines here is a decision made against the market every year.

What is listed is broader than the vines. The record covers the special tools used during harvest — ferentini, kofinia — the peculiar architecture of the wineries, kanava and patitiri, the harvest folklore and celebrations that mark the new vintage, and the island's wine vocabulary as it developed over time. The protected object is a working culture: the words, the baskets, the buildings and the songs, not simply the appellation on the label.

Santorini's wineries sell views as well as wine, and they say so. Venetsanos, carved into the caldera cliff at Megalochori, invites visitors to see the first industrial winery on the island and take a wine tasting with a light lunch. Santo Wines, the cooperative at Pyrgos, runs winery tours, wine and olive-oil tastings, a restaurant, a documentary film and a shop, with a separate booking route for groups over ten guests.

The island's producers differ in what they show you. Domaine Sigalas sits among the vines on the old plain outside Oia and builds its story around Paris Sigalas and the mathematics he brought to Assyrtiko. Hatzidakis, at Pyrgos, frames its estate around keeping the kouloura pruning system across every vineyard it manages. Choosing between them is choosing which argument about Santorini you want to hear on the ground.