Why you should seek out vinsanto, Santorini's beloved dessert wine

My first taste of vinsanto is a delicious surprise; I tend to think of dessert wines as heavy — Christmassy, even — but this is gloriously light and eminently drinkable. The fact I’m drinking it at all is almost by accident. I ordered a glass simply to buy myself more time at this restaurant, which has the sunset view every visitor to Santorini is after: the caldera, scattered with white-painted, blue-roofed houses, set against the red and orange sky.

The island is rightly known for its beautiful cliffside towns, but the landscape isn’t lush like the Saronic islands of Agistri or Hydra. The soil is too dry for anything to grow without cultivation, and the minerality has a huge impact on what flourishes here. On a drive that snakes around the coastline from Oia, in Santorini’s north, I realise something’s missing: there are no trees. The black, volcanic sands and arid hillsides offer a stark counterpoint to the island’s bright, white architecture.

When I arrive at Estate Argyros, one of Santorini’s largest wineries, in the centre of the island, I’m met by Dimitrios Kekas, who’s worked here for almost 30 years and looks after sales. He’s got an easy confidence about him, and a purposeful stride as he leads me towards the vines. It takes me a while to spot them — it turns out I’m looking too high up, searching for rows of vertical vines when I should be looking at the ground. That’s when Dimitrios shows me the koulouras, the basket-shaped results of a vine-pruning technique unique to Santorini, some of which date back 300 years. “It’s a nest that can protect the grapes inside,” he explains.

Grapes thrive under consistent conditions, but as the climate here is hugely changeable, a vertical vine doesn’t give the fruit the protection it needs from the elements. In response to this, the island’s winemakers began training their vines around low hoops: the leaves act as umbrellas against the wind, volcanic sands and heat of the sun and allow the grapes to ripen in the centre. The koulouras are also designed to help with the lack of rainfall: their close proximity to the ground means the vines can easily draw up water from the pumice stones in the volcanic soil. This provides welcome moisture in the dry summer months in the early morning, as they trap the dew that settles from the sea air. The chilled moisture inside the circular vines also acts as a small-scale refrigeration system. “During the harvest season, growers used to put their lunch in the koulouras early in the morning to keep it cool,” Dimitrios tells me.

Yet, for all the cooling that goes on, there would be no vinsanto without the sun’s heat. The grapes are sun-dried for up to two weeks in high summer, and it’s this drying process that gives the wine its intense flavour and deep red shade.

Dimitrios leads me to a huge table in an echoing white space that feels a lot more like a chic wedding venue than a winery. Pouring out small glasses of vinsanto, he tells me to watch for notes of “rustic coffee beans, butterscotch, cigar box and oak”. The complex flavours are brought out further by accompanying pieces of dark chocolate and salty blue cheese, the contrasting bitterness and salt working wonderfully in tandem with the sweetness of the wine. “It’s very fine, very elegant, with perfect balance,” Dimitrios says.

Traditional techniques

Despite Santorini’s palpable pride in its local wines, Greek wines in general don’t have the best international reputation thanks to the tendency to export the cheapest plonk in the 1970s and 1980s. That’s something winemakers have since been working to change, but in the case of vinsanto, most people get their first taste of it on the island.

Overlooking Fira, the capital, Santo Wines is Santorini’s busiest winery, and when I arrive it’s heaving with people clamouring to secure the best caldera view for lunch at the onsite restaurant. Initially formed as Santorini Vine & Wine Protection Fund in 1911, it now also incorporates a 1,200-member strong wine co-operative. I’m shown around by Anastasios Terzidis, who joined Santo Wines in 2019. “We’re the only co-operative on the island,” he tells me. Many Santorinian families own small plots of farmland and vineyards that have been inherited and passed on through the generations, but don’t have the capacity to make their own wines. In the cooperative, these grapes are sold to Santo Wines, allowing individuals to profit from their land and cultivation without the need for time- and cost-intensive invesments. “Most of them don’t have farming as a primary activity,” says Anastasios. “It’s the way it works on the island.”

Santorini assyrtiko grapes, the variety used in vinsanto, have Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status, as do the island’s yellow fava beans, tomatoes and vinsanto wine itself. For winemakers to maintain this PDO status — and to use the name vinsanto, rather than simply calling their product a dessert wine — the traditional ripening and ageing methods must be used. After the grapes are sun-dried, the wine is aged in oak barrels for a minimum of two years. Further ageing must happen in multiples of four years to get the balance between sweetness and acidity just right. How long the ageing process lasts is up to the winemakers, but slow is the only way. Of the more than 20 winemakers on the island, only a handful make vinsanto.

Showing me around the winery’s underground production area, Anastasios explains it’s “built vertically on different levels in order to take advantage of the gravity. As we produce the wine, we let it naturally flow from one level to the other.” This means the wine needs to be pumped less, which reduces energy consumption and, apparently, improves the flavour.

Back above ground, I’m presented with a flight of wines, including several vinsantos that have been aged for varying lengths of time. The longer the ageing process, the more the robust flavours come out ­— coffee, chocolate and that all-important caramel. The wines are accompanied by a snack plate of mild cheeses, salty olives (the sort that always taste better under the sun) and paximadi (crunchy barley rusks that are popular across the Greek islands). Despite the crowds, no one’s rushing me — it’s too hot to rush anything. Sunshine and food are to be lingered over here.

As the afternoon sun softens, I visit the small town of Pyrgos, a beautiful tangle of tiny streets 1,070ft above sea level. On its edge lies Hatzidakis Winery, the island’s only certified organic wine producer. There’s an immediate warmth to the place ­­— no mean feat given it’s set in an enormous cave. The acoustics are dramatic: the place echoes with the sound of laughter, emanating from whichever of the long tables the owner, Konstantinas Chryssou, is entertaining. She’s asked her eldest son, Antonis — back from university for the summer — to show me around the winery, and as we make our way through the network of caves, he explains they’re a big part of the winery’s philosophy of respecting the environment and saving energy. “My father didn’t want to destroy a vineyard to build a winery, so he had the idea of digging caves underground,” he tells me. We’re about 10 metres below ground level, which explains the chill in the air and highlights again just how important a steady temperature is for winemaking. “The temperature here is natural,” Antonis says. “It’s stable, around 16C, always the same, even in winter.” On our rounds, he points out his little sister, Stella, who’s peering over a vat of wine twice her height. Her childhood drawings adorn some of the Hatzidakis Winery labels — family is definitely at the heart of the business. “When I was younger, I wished my parents had a toy shop or something, but now it’s perfect,” Antonis laughs.

Of all the vinsanto wines I try on my trip, the version at Hatzidakis Winery, which has been aged in French oak barrels for 16 years, is the richest, with sweet caramel notes that linger on the palate. Konstantinas believes their organic methods, with no chemicals used, have an enormous impact on the grapes. “You produce a good wine in the winery, but an excellent wine in the vineyard,” she tells me, recalling something her late husband Haridimos often said. This ethos is one that Konstantinas still follows today. “If you take care of the grapes and you love them and you respect them, they give the best they can,” she says.

Facing the future

The final leg of my vineyard-hopping tour takes me back to the centre of the island, to Canava Roussos, a family-run vineyard dating back six generations, to the beginning of the 19th century. Here, Agape Roussos runs the day-to-day business with her brother Spyros, while the winemaking is overseen by their father, Yiannis. In the peaceful bougainvillea-draped courtyard, the shade welcomes me like an old friend, as does the wonderfully rich vinsanto. I graze on another plate of cheeses and other snacks. In the evenings, the Roussos family serve al fresco dinners and host occasional theatre performances; it’s easy to imagine stopping by for a glass in the afternoon and not leaving until long after darkness has fallen.

Because of vinsanto’s glorious burnished-red colour, I’d originally thought it was made with red grapes. But, to be called a vinsanto, the wine must be made with at least 51% assyrtiko, a white grape indigenous to the island. “Assyrtiko is a white grape, but it behaves as a red, and we treat it as a red,” Agape tells me. “It has acidity, minerality and salinity.” 

To create the wine’s characteristic lightness, assyrtiko grapes need a considerable amount of time to age. The oak of the barrels smooths and softens the grape’s harsher edges. Agape shows me the barrels in which they age their wine — they’re the biggest I’ve ever seen, each containing 1,400 litres of wine. “These barrels are Russian oak; they’re very special — 100 years old,” Agape says, adding that they contain a 43-year-old vinsanto, the last wine produced by her late grandfather.

It’s easy to come to Santorini and be dazzled by the iconic white buildings with their blue hats, but this is a hard-working agricultural island. The efforts of islanders to get visitors to look beyond the views and sunsets is hugely important for Santorini’s future. In the face of ever-increasing development here, Agape is among several winemakers campaigning for Santorini’s vineyards to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site. “We need to come back to the land,” she says. “The previous generation — our grandfathers — are passing away, so we’re losing the information, techniques, history. It has to begin here.”

Every winery I’ve visited has taught me something about the island’s history, as well as about vinsanto itself — tradition remains hugely important. I remember something Konstantinas Hatzidakis told me about how we talk about wine. “You don’t have to describe: remember the feeling,” she said. “I feel, I taste, I remember.” And as I look back on the words I’ve scribbled down to describe the vinsantos I’ve tried — ‘calm’, ‘gentle’, ‘soft’, ‘warm’ — I realise just how much feeling is present. Here, wine goes a lot deeper than flavour.