Harvest Week: In Greece, A Grown Up’s Wine, Made by “Kids”

The Greek wine grape harvest is almost over. The dry and hot weather conditions throughout the year helped the grapes ripen earlier than usual, around ten days ahead of last year – a meaningful number when it comes to the delicate business of selecting what to pick for the harvest. After the previous year, a disastrous vintage for many, producers in Greece’s major wine regions finally have something to be excited about. The harvest that has us excited, though, took place just an hour’s drive from Athens, in a lesser-known wine region near Corinth. Here you can find the tiny vineyard of John Papargyriou, one of Greece’s most celebrated rising winemakers, with his wines selling out fast both at home and abroad.

Greece's 2015 Wine Harvest

There is an ancient saying in Greek, Theros, Trygos, Polemos, meaning “wheat harvest, wine harvest and war”: All three are situations that need immediate attention and cannot be postponed until later. Hopefully there will be no war, but having completed the wheat harvest, we are nearing the finish line of the wine harvest.

Dionysus Returns

There’s been a revolution taking place in Greece over the last couple of decades, and it doesn’t have much to do with the political and economic turbulence troubling the country – it’s all about wine. Wine in Greece, of course, has ancient origins: The first traces of it were discovered on the island of Crete and date back to 2500 BCE, during the Minoan civilization, and the oldest winepress in the world was found in the ruins of Vathypetro, near Heraklio.