Tales from Crete | 11

It is Wednesday morning and outside I can just make out the 40-tonne truck on its way to our warehouse after almost 50 hours of driving and a good 3000 km on the country roads from Athens, where we collect our goods before they are driven to our warehouse in Hem.

It's always exciting when new items come in, but today is extra exciting. Because most of our new wine range arrives today. Something I have personally been looking forward to since this summer, when I myself was down to taste many of the wines that are now stacked on pallets and will shortly be driven into our warehouse. I can hardly wait to get out and see the many pallets of wine and other good things. But as you can see, it is probably the Greek wines that most of all attract my attention. Not because I have any special understanding of wines, but more because there are so many to choose from and the taste nuances are so diverse depending on where the individual grape varieties are grown and how the wines are made and stored. Greece has a wine history that goes all the way back to 700 BC. but despite that, the country is still in its infancy when it comes to wine production. It is connected with the fact that it was forbidden to grow wine during the Ottoman rule, which reigned well into the 20th century.

But in recent years, the Greeks have again begun to believe in the country's future as a wine-growing nation, and since the 1960s, significant investments have been made to bring Greece back to the leading position in European viticulture and to live up to the fact that the Greeks were the ones who brought the wine to Europe .

But like everything else in viticulture, it takes time to find the right thing, so it will probably be a few more years before Greece is once again among the leaders in wine production.

It is still the local grape varieties that dominate the picture, but as more and more European wine regions create great results with more international grape varieties, the Greek winegrowers have been motivated to pull up some of the local vines to plant new varieties such as Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Sauvignon and it has already produced fantastic results.

Most people probably immediately know Greece from beautiful pictures and good holidays, which, if they involve wine, often contain a vague memory of something that was served in jugs in copious amounts in a tavern, but it is no longer like that at all. There is an incredible amount of extremely good wine in Greece and areas such as Nemea, Samos and Crete are at the absolute top when it comes to quality wines, and it is of course from those areas that the big truck has its load. 

Until membership of the EU, the Greeks mostly produced wine from local grapes such as Agiorgitiko,

Mandilaria, Liatiko, and Mavrodaphne, but today you quite often see wines in the international style, on the grapes; Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Syrah.

Back to the desk…..the truck has now passed and is probably being unloaded at our warehouse at the end of the building, so now I think I’ll just slip out into the warehouse and have a nice reunion but some of the wines I tasted for a few months ago. It will be such a joy to meet again on my part and I can almost already feel the Cretan heat sneaking up on me and smell the scents from the vineyards I visited when the wine selection for Elena's had to be selected.

I don't know if it will end up with a small glass of the noble grapes later in the day, but for now I want to say "Jammas" and wish you all a really nice weekend.