Greece

Wine has long permeated Greek life and culture.

Historians date the earliest Greek cultivation of grapes for wine to 6500 BCE (before the Christian era). While Bacchus, the Roman wine god, is a name better known to wine lovers, the Greeks christened Dionysus as their wine god long before Rome became a republic in about the Fifth Century BCE.

Worshiped as early as 1500-11000 BCE by Mycenean Greeks—who then dominated the Aegean Sea—today, Dionysus is the god of wine and winemakers not only in Greece, but renowned and worshipped as Greek civilization spread its influence over the intervening centuries and millennia up to the present.

From key mainland viticultural areas to the country’s many islands situated in the eastern Mediterranean, Greece is an up-and-coming wine producing country with growing numbers of enthusiastic fans around the world.

Greek revels in a stunning array of indigenous red and white grapes, from the red Agiorgitiko (“St. George’s grape”) and native to Nemea that grows mainly in the Peloponnese area to Assyrtiko, a white Greek wine grape indigenous to the island of Santorini.