TO YOUR TASTE : GREEK WINE

Sophia Sahinidou

Hundreds of years ago, before anything else existed on earth , there were only the Gods. On an ordinary day, just like all the others, a baby came out of Zeus's leg. It was Dionysos, Zeus's and Semeli's child. Dionysos was very keen on having fun, dancing, playing music and getting drunk. When the people started living on earth he taught them how to plant grapes and produce wine. That's how the Greeks learned about wine.

Nowadays, with God's blessing - as the old people keep on saying, Greek grapes grow on the rocks till August. At this time everybody gets together and they start harvesting the grapes. They put them in large crates and deliver them to modern factories.

Some years ago they used to pick the grapes, put them in baskets and deliver them on donkeys to huge places were everything was clean and ready to work on them. People used to crush them by walking on them, and then they put them in barrels. If the juice was red, they used to put it in a dark place and keep it for years. There a magic hand turned it into wine. This process, with some recent refinements, continues today, and Greek wines are once again claiming their rightful place as the wine for the connoisseur.

One of the best Greek wines is Amethystos . It has a refreshing, clean and enigmatic taste. Chateau Lazaridis is a rich wine, full of goodness to the last drop, and another fine, slightly smoky, wine is Antonopoulos, which has just a hint of wild fruit. Have you ever heard of Gialova? No? It's a village in the Peloponnese with a quite excellent local red wine, which keeps it's freshness all the way through the bottle. In addition, the winner of the Gold medal in Bordeaux, a Chateau Semeli Cabernet Sauvignon from Nemea, is a superb aromatic robust wine of the highest caliber. There are others, such as Tselepou's Nemea, and you can often find an excellent local wine if you know where to look, or even hit upon one by chance.

I must admit that I haven't tried any of these wines as I am not allowed to drink alcohol, but a wine expert friend of mine did it for me. He also insists on telling me that his criterion for a good wine is that it should taste as good at the end of the bottle as it did at the beginning. In my opinion it's better to taste it than read about it!

Sophia Sahinidou is a 16 year old student at the Fourth Lykeio. She is interested in travel, has an interesting collection of miniature houses from many countries and enjoys playing the piano and painting. She is currently editor of the English Times of Katerini, having contributed to every issue since its inception, and is working for the Proficiency examinations.