The Drinks Business
15 December 2020
By Lauren Eads
Greece is one of the oldest wine-producing regions in the world, and yet in modern winemaking terms recognition on a global scale has eluded its winemakers.
Its ancient heritage for winemaking is well known, but its viticultural story has more often that not been resigned to history books, rather than the international wine stage. It’s not due to a lack of quality, but perhaps an unfortunate stereotype, combined with a somewhat introverted wine industry, that is to say, domestic rather than internationally-focused.
Writing in his book
The Wines of Greece, Konstantinos Lazarakis MW, explains: “I often see old friends at wine fairs in France, the UK or the US. Even today, when I invite them over to the Greek stands to taste some wine I frequently get the one-line response, ‘I do not like retsina’, as an answer. And it is wine professionals I am talking about here, so this just goes to show the huge amount of work the Greek wine industry needs to do in order to convince the world of Greece’s worth as a wine-producing nation.”