Wine Tour Santorini

Santorini makes wine unlike anywhere else, and it does it in conditions that ought to make wine impossible: almost no rain, relentless wind, and soil that is volcanic ash and pumice rather than earth. Three hours among the vineyards explains how, and lets you taste the result.

The first surprise is that you can barely see them. Santorini’s vines are not trained upward on wires but woven into low baskets that sit on the ground — the kouloura — with the fruit growing inside the coil, sheltered from wind that would otherwise strip it and catching the moisture that condenses overnight. From the road a vineyard looks like a field of wicker.

The soil is the second. Volcanic ground here was never reached by phylloxera, so a good many of these vines are ungrafted and very old, and they yield very little. That scarcity is most of the character in the glass.

The island’s estates divide into two kinds, and they are different visits. Some sit on the rim of the caldera, where the tasting terrace hangs over the drop and the view does half the work. Others are out among the vineyards inland, where there is nothing to look at but the vines and the wine gets your full attention.

Several of the cliff-side estates stand within a short distance of one another, which is what makes an afternoon like this workable at all. A visit runs about three-quarters of an hour: a walk through the works — the presses, the tanks, the cellar — and then the tasting, poured and explained by someone from the estate.

Assyrtiko is the island’s grape and the reason winemakers come here to look: bone dry, high in acid, and tasting of citrus and salt and struck flint in a way that reads unmistakably as this island.

Then Vinsanto, its opposite — grapes sun-dried on mats after picking, then aged, giving a sweet wine of dried fruit and caramel that Santorini has been making for centuries. Tasting the two side by side, from the same soil, is the point of the visit.

There is little shade in a Santorini vineyard — hat, water, sunglasses. Tell us at booking if someone in your party is not drinking, so the wineries can have something else ready. Harvest falls unusually early here, often in August, and a winery in the middle of it is a working site rather than a quiet one.