The ancient Greeks understood that wine was not Dionysus’s invention.
Wine was older than Dionysus. The Linear B tablets from the Bronze Age palaces of Knossos and Mycenae, the same tablets the olive tree article in this collection develops through the OLE ideogram and the e-ra-wa syllabic spelling, record wine alongside the olive oil as the two primary liquids whose production and distribution and ritual use the palatial economy managed. The Mycenaean palace at Pylos allocated wine to religious purposes in the same administrative tablets that recorded its commercial production. Wine was in the Greek world before the Dionysian theological tradition organized the Greek world’s understanding of what wine was.
What Dionysus contributed was not the wine but the theology of the wine: the account of what the wine did and what the wine was for and what the experience of the wine’s effect on the organized rational individual meant about the relationship between the organized rational individual and the divine force whose presence the wine made available.
The Bacchae article in this collection develops the Dionysian theology through the question that Euripides asked in the god’s own theater in 405 BCE: what happens when the organized civic world refuses to acknowledge the force whose periodic release through the organized theatrical and ritual tradition is the condition of the organized civic world’s continued capacity for self-renewal? The wine was not the answer to that question. The wine was the medium through which the theological experience of the Dionysian dissolution was most conveniently available in the daily life of the person who had not undergone the ritual preparation of the mystery tradition.
The symposion was the institutional form through which the organized civic world managed the wine’s theological content: the controlled drinking occasion whose governance by the symposiarch, the appointed manager of the wine ratios, organized the dissolution that the wine produced within the social framework whose continuation required the dissolution to be incomplete. The symposion was not a party. It was the civic institution whose design was the design of the controlled encounter with the Dionysian force within the social frame that prevented the encounter from becoming the catastrophe that the uncontrolled encounter produced.
The water-to-wine ratio at the symposion was typically three parts water to one part wine, or two to one for the stronger occasions whose intellectual program required the additional loosening of the organized rational inhibition. The symposiarch who called for unmixed wine was the symposiarch invoking the Dionysian tradition’s most radical available expression in the social context whose continuation required the symposiarch to know when to stop.
This is the theological context in which the Greek regional wine tradition developed.
The Volcanic Terroir and Its Theology
The volcanic arc article in this collection develops the South Aegean Volcanic Arc from Methana to Nisyros as the geological system whose surface expression gives the Aegean islands their geological characters: the combination of the volcanic deposits and the tectonic activity and the Meltemi’s abrasive action producing the soils whose mineral content and drainage properties the viticulture of each volcanic island expresses in the character of the wine each island produces.
The Assyrtiko of Santorini is the expression of the Santorini caldera’s volcanic geology in the form of a wine. The vines are trained in the basket shape, the kouloura, the same word that names the basket-trained vine form and that names the bread roll whose circular form the basket evokes, and the function of the kouloura training is the function that the volcanic geology of Santorini most directly requires: the protection of the fruit from the Meltemi’s force at a height low enough that the vine’s leaves create the microclimate that the fruit requires, and the concentration of the morning moisture in the depression of the basket form where the dew collects and the fruit absorbs it from the volcanic pumice and ash in the absence of irrigation.
The Assyrtiko’s flavor profile, the bone-dry structure and the high acidity and the distinctive saline character, is the expression of the volcanic soil’s mineral content and the sea air’s salt and the combination of the caldera’s geology and the Aegean’s presence that the wine’s terroir produces. The Poseidon article in this collection develops Cape Sounion and the Aegean name and the character of the sea that surrounds every Cycladic island. The Assyrtiko is the wine that tastes of that sea through the medium of the volcanic soil that the sea surrounds.
The Muscat of Samos, the sweet golden wine whose terrain character the Samos article in this collection develops through the connection between the island’s volcanic and limestone geology and the Muscat Blanc à Petits Grains grape whose cultivation the cooperative tradition has maintained since 1934, is the wine whose flavor profile, the orange blossom and the apricot and the honey that reflect the combination of the island’s warm dry summer and the volcanic and limestone soil, expresses the island’s particular geological character in the form that the sweet wine tradition requires.
Samos was the birthplace of Pythagoras and the site of the Eupalinos tunnel and the unfinished Heraion. The Samos article names the wine correctly as the expression of the island’s terrain: to taste it is to taste the island’s soil expressed through a form that has been continuous since the ancient period. The Muscat carries the island’s character in a form whose sweetness reflects the warmth of the terrain that the ancient theological tradition organized around Hera’s sacred marriage to Zeus at the location of the Heraion whose single surviving column the Samos article places in the afternoon light with the Turkish coast visible across the strait.
The Muscat of Limnos, produced from the Muscat of Alexandria grape on the island whose mythological tradition the Limnos article in this collection develops through the Hephaestus tradition, carries the volcanic depth that distinguishes it from the Samos Muscat: the Limnos volcanic geology, whose character is the character of the island that the Olympian smith chose as his workshop when he was expelled from Olympus, gives the Limnos Muscat the mineral depth whose smoky character the volcanic substrate most directly produces.
The Peloponnese and Its Heroic Grapes
Nemea is the valley where Heracles killed the Nemean Lion as the first of the twelve labors, and whose geographical character, the enclosed valley whose limestone hillsides and altitude range produce the conditions that the Agiorgitiko grape requires, gives the wine its particular connection to the heroic tradition that the valley encodes.
The Agiorgitiko, the grape of Saint George, is the red grape of Nemea whose cultivation the Peloponnese has maintained across the succession of the Mycenaean and the classical and the Byzantine and the Ottoman and the modern periods. The name is the saint’s name rather than the ancient hero’s name, and the overlapping of the saint’s red cross tradition with the ancient blood of the heroic labor in the same valley where both traditions intersect is the cultural layering that the Peloponnese most consistently produces: the ancient tradition and the Christian tradition occupying the same landscape simultaneously, neither displacing the other.
The Agiorgitiko’s flavor range, from the fruit-driven expressions of the valley floor whose lower elevation and warmer microclimate produce the soft and accessible style to the concentrated and age-worthy expressions of the higher vineyards whose altitude and cooler nights extend the growing season and develop the tannin structure, is the range that the valley’s altitudinal variation produces in the same grape across the differences of elevation within the single appellation.
The Temple of Zeus at Nemea, whose archaeological character as the site of the Nemean Games in the Panhellenic athletic tradition the collection’s Foloi forest article develops through the proximity to the ancient Olympia and whose position in the valley gives the contemporary visitor the spatial relationship between the ancient sanctuary and the contemporary vineyard, is the site where the ancient heroic tradition and the contemporary wine tradition are most directly present in the same landscape simultaneously.
Mantinia in Arcadia is the high plateau, at approximately 650 metres above sea level, whose combination of the altitude and the cool nights and the limestone and volcanic soil gives the Moschofilero grape its particular character. Arcadia is the region whose mythological tradition the collection’s Epicurus article touches through the Arcadian pastoral tradition and whose character as the mythological landscape of the undisturbed pastoral life, the landscape of Pan and the nymphs and the flocks, gives the Mantinia plateau its particular quality of the place that has been the landscape of the desired simplicity in the Greek literary and mythological tradition from the Hellenistic period onward.
The Moschofilero is a grape of unusual character: the pink-tinged skin whose pigmentation produces a white wine with a faintly rosy tinge, the aromatic profile of rose petal and citrus blossom and ginger that the grape’s natural terpene compounds produce, and the structural delicacy that the high-altitude cool-climate growing conditions require the producer to manage carefully to preserve. The wine is the expression of the Arcadian landscape in the form that the pastoral tradition most directly captures: the lightness and the fragrant quality of the place where the pastoral ideal was most completely located in the ancient literary tradition.
The Northern Tradition and the Macedonian Inheritance
The Xinomavro of Naoussa is the red grape of Macedonia whose particular character the collection’s multiple references to Alexander the Great and the Macedonian tradition have touched without developing at length. The Xinomavro, whose name means the sour black in the direct translation of the xino and the mavro, is the grape whose high acidity and firm tannins and savory aromatics, the sun-dried tomato and the black olive and the anise and the dried rose whose combination gives the mature Xinomavro its characteristic profile, produce the wine that the comparison to the Nebbiolo of Piedmont most consistently captures in the contemporary wine vocabulary: not because the grapes are related but because the combination of the structural intensity and the aromatic complexity and the aging requirement in both grapes produces the style of the wine that rewards the patient drinker who understands that the tannin structure requires the time that the winery’s cellaring or the collector’s patience provides.
The Macedonian kingdom, whose character as the political force that unified the Greek world and then carried it beyond its natural boundaries into Asia and Egypt and India, was organized around the cultural traditions whose wine culture was the wine culture of the symposion tradition that Philip II and Alexander both maintained with the intensity that the ancient sources record as both the expression of the Macedonian cultural identity and the source of some of the most consequential episodes in Alexander’s personal and political history.
The Rapsani blend from the lower slopes of Mount Olympus, the combination of the Xinomavro and the Krassato and the Stavroto that the appellation’s indigenous grape tradition maintains, is the wine whose production in the landscape immediately below the divine mountain gives it its particular character as the wine that is most directly produced in the shadow of the theological tradition that the mountain represents. The Kouretes article in this collection develops the first Olympic Games at Dion, the Macedonian sacred city at the base of Olympus whose character as the site where Alexander sacrificed before his Persian campaign is named in the session’s pending article candidates. The wine from the mountain’s slopes is the expression of that landscape in the form that the viticulture has maintained since the ancient period.
The Debina of Epirus, the white grape of the region around the ancient oracle of Dodona that the Epirus article in this collection develops through the character of the oldest oracle in the Greek world whose prophecies came from the rustling of the sacred oak’s leaves rather than from the volcanic vapors of Delphi, is the wine whose high acidity and light body and clean notes of green apple and pear produce the style of the wine that the Epirus tradition has maintained in the sparkling version that the traditional method fermentation produces.
The Dodona oracle’s theological character, the divine communication through the natural movement of the oak’s leaves in the wind that the Selloi priests interpreted, is the theological tradition whose connection to the wine of the same region is the connection that the Epirus landscape most directly encodes: the sparkling Debina, whose effervescence the traditional second fermentation produces, is the wine that most directly expresses the lightness and the clarity of the region whose oracle spoke through the wind.
The Cretan Tradition and the Minoan Inheritance
The Cretan wine tradition is the wine tradition whose depth in the collection’s coverage comes through the volcanic arc article’s development of the Minoan eruption and through the olive tree article’s development of the Bronze Age palatial economy. The Linear B tablets from Knossos record wine alongside the olive oil as the two primary products of the Minoan palatial economy. The wine presses at Vathypetro, whose archaeological character as Europe’s oldest known wine press dating to approximately 1600 BCE the sacred table article develops, give the Cretan wine tradition its Bronze Age foundation.
The Vidiano, the indigenous white grape of Crete whose revival in the contemporary Cretan wine tradition has given the island its most significant new white wine of the modern period, produces a wine whose richness and textural quality, the combination of the ripe fruit and the mineral structure and the weight that the Cretan climate and limestone soil produce, reflect the character of the island whose agricultural tradition has been continuous since the Minoan period.
The Liatiko, the traditional red grape of Crete whose cultivation the island has maintained across the millennia of the Minoan and the Byzantine and the Venetian and the Ottoman periods, produces a wine whose character, the pale colour and the dried cherry and the earthiness, reflects the combination of the island’s warm climate and the grape’s genetic material whose antiquity in the Cretan viticulture the ancient sources confirm.
The Ionian Tradition and the Odyssean Landscape
The Robola of Cephalonia is the white grape of the island that the Homeric tradition named as the kingdom of Odysseus, and whose cultivation in the porous limestone soil of the Omala valley at altitude gives the wine its mineral character and citrus clarity.
The Odyssey article in this collection, if it is in the collection, develops the Ithaca tradition. Cephalonia’s claim to the Odyssean tradition, which is the competing ancient claim to the island that the Homeric evidence most directly supports, is the claim whose content the contemporary scholarship has not resolved in favor of either Ithaca or Cephalonia definitively. What is not in dispute is that the limestone geology of the Ionian islands, whose porous karst character the Melissani cave lake on Cephalonia most directly expresses in the formation of the underground lake whose tidal connection to the sea through the limestone the cave’s character makes visible, is the geology that gives the Robola its particular mineral quality.
The wine’s flavor profile, the citrus and the mineral and the clean acidity, is the flavor profile of the wine that the geology most directly produces: the porous limestone that drains rapidly and forces the vine’s root system to seek water at depth through the rock produces the mineral character that the Chablis and the Pouilly-Fumé of the limestone regions of France also express, and the comparison is correct not because the grapes are related but because the geological mechanism of the limestone’s drainage and the vine’s root response to it produces the same flavor character in different grapes in different places.
What the Wine Was
The Greek regional wine tradition is the tradition whose character as the living geological and cultural record of the landscapes that produced it gives it the particular quality that the ancient tradition identified as the quality that distinguished the wine from other pleasures: it was the pleasure that carried the landscape in a form that the drinker absorbed.
The symposion was the institution whose governance of the wine’s dissolution was the governance of the encounter between the organized rational individual and the landscape whose character the wine expressed. The symposiarch who managed the ratio of the water to the wine was managing the degree of the landscape’s presence in the social occasion: the undiluted wine was the landscape fully present, which was the condition that the ecstatic tradition sought and that the symposion tradition governed.
The contemporary Greek wine tradition is the direct continuation of the ancient viticulture whose Bronze Age foundation the Linear B tablets record and whose theological architecture the Dionysian tradition organized. The indigenous grapes, the Assyrtiko and the Agiorgitiko and the Moschofilero and the Xinomavro and the Debina and the Vidiano and the Robola and the Muscat varieties, are the genetic material whose continuous cultivation across the succession of the ancient and the Byzantine and the Ottoman and the modern periods has maintained the connection between the landscape and the wine that the ancient tradition identified as the wine’s particular value.
To taste these wines is to taste the landscapes whose character the ancient tradition encoded in the theological framework that gave the wine its meaning: the volcanic mineral of the Santorini caldera, the pastoral fragrance of the Arcadian plateau, the heroic concentration of the Nemean valley, the oracular clarity of the Epirot mountains, the Minoan depth of the Cretan limestone, the Odyssean mineral of the Ionian karst.
The wine did not need Dionysus to have this character. But Dionysus is the reason we know what to call it.
At Olympus Estate, Food and Seasonal Life traces the Greek table from the Linear B tablets to the contemporary harvest. The Linear B tablets recorded wine alongside olive oil as the two primary products of the Bronze Age palatial economy. The wine presses at Vathypetro on Crete date to approximately 1600 BCE. The symposiarch managed the water-to-wine ratio as the governance of the encounter between the organized rational individual and the Dionysian force. The Assyrtiko tastes of the Santorini caldera and the Aegean’s salt simultaneously. The Moschofilero carries the fragrance of the Arcadian plateau where Pan’s pastoral tradition located the undisturbed simplicity. The Xinomavro rewards the patient drinker. The Debina of Epirus speaks with the clarity of the wind through the sacred oak at Dodona. The wine did not need Dionysus to have this character. But Dionysus is the reason we know what to call it.
