There’s a particular white wine I’m sipping that transports me back to the sun-bleached limestone and olive-tree-studded mountainsides of southern Greece. It was introduced to me on our trip last month by Giannis, a fourth-generation winemaker in the off-the-beaten-path Papagiannakos Winery sandwiched between the bustle of Athens and the blue waters of Artemis Beach on the Grecian coast.
Winemakers speak of the terroir of wines—the characteristics of the grape’s environment, soil, and weather that give each batch of wine its unique flavor.
It’s not an exaggeration to say the terroir of this wine is imbued with Greek history, myth, the roots of western philosophy and science, and the whispers of capricious gods.
When I drink it now, 6,000 miles away in Colorado, I remember white-washed towns perched along ancient harbors, fresh-caught fish, wind blowing through the empty vanes of antique windmills, and green-eyed cats hoping for scraps beneath sidewalk café tables.
I see a tall, dark-eyed, dark-haired vintner telling stories of his great-grandfather selling jugs of wine to local taverns who passed it off as their own, and of his father making the scandalous decision to break tradition and bottle their liquid gold and sell it under their own name. And how now they sell their wine in 28 different countries.
But there are more stories here in this glass. I see Pegasus striking a rock in Corinth, causing a spring of fresh water to burst forth.
I see the soaring columns of a Temple to Apollo capped with sunlight, reflecting the golden god’s beauty.
I journey on sailboats skimming waves of a hundred shades of blue, most of them somehow unique to the Aegean Sea. I walk beaches of marble pebbles and worn-smooth pieces of red ceramic—whether from 200-year-old roof tiles or thousand-year-old pottery or last month’s broken saucer, it’s impossible to tell.
I taste an unfamiliar alphabet on my tongue as I sound out two-thousand-year-old city names on street signs.
In this wine, I taste Aphrodite’s beauty, Hermes’s playfulness, Zeus’s unrestrainable desire for forbidden passion, and his wife Hera’s bitter jealousy. And here is Dionysus’s full range of power, from the joy of wine’s release and pleasure to its darker side of broken promises and regret.
All this from a glass of white wine?
Yes. All this and more.
To Americans like me, Greece is both somewhat unfamiliar and yet wholly woven into our stories of ourselves, and even into our way of telling those stories.
This bottle of wine, an unexpected find in an unexpected corner of Greece, made it safely home with me in my luggage. As I sit here now, sipping it slowly, I am not here.
Look for me instead on the sundrenched hills near Athens, drifting through the broken and weathered monuments to gods, listening to the wind sing through ancient olive branches, hearing the cadence of ancient stories echoing in my bones.
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