When Yiannis Paraskevopoulos first arrived on the island of Santorini to explore its wine scene, he didn’t like what he tasted. As he told me during a tasting at his beachfront wine bar-cum-winery, back then, in 1989, “the wines were shitty”: roughly acidic, rustic, oxidised. “What are we doing here?“, he asked the man who had brought him there, his mentor and employer at the time, Yiannis Boutaris.
Boutaris, one of the key figures in modern Greek wine, didn’t disagree. Despite the island’s 34 centuries of winemaking, the wines themselves were indeed pretty bad, he said. Nevertheless, Boutaris was convinced Santorini was a “paradise for wine”. It was just a matter of time before it took its place on the world stage. “Have patience,” he told his puzzled protege.
