We all get some random perks from our parents, and for me it was family friends in Mykonos. I don’t mean friends with a house in Mykonos, you understand; there are suburbs in Athens where everyone seems to have one of those. I mean actual Mykonians, born, raised, and maturing there, the type of people that stay for the winter. It was probably some time in middle school that I realised the social cachet associated with it. A couple of years later I finally got to make use of it.
“What do you want to do while you’re here?”, my hosts’ sons asked on picking me up from the port. “Well, the real thing!” I answered, and they were, of course, unsurprised. You grow up in a place like this, you get that a lot. So, they dutifully spent a couple of days showing me around the big dance clubs. We hung out with the waiters and bartenders, and sneaked into VIP sections, and listened to all the celebrity stories. Finally, a few days in, stoicism running out, they asked if I would like to see where they like to go when they go out. I enthusiastically agreed, naturally. I am not sure quite what I expected. Probably some open-air Bacchanalian supernova, but I would have settled for some speakeasy-style private affair where all the other attendees had a star on Hollywood Boulevard.
Instead, I got a hard rock bar. Some classic stuff early on. Some heavier stuff later. There were no celebrities, but many teenagers in band T-shirts. There was a lot of Pantera.
I think back to this story every now and then when I try to recommend Greek versions of Bordeaux blends to non-Greek friends, and I am immediately given short shrift. “I don’t care about that,” they reflexively say, “it’s native varieties I care about!”. The underlying thinking seems to rest on two dubious assumptions. Authenticity lies on native grapes is one, and international grape varieties will give unremarkable, or at best generic, results is another.
Everyone seems to overindulge in authenticity these days, but even by those high standards, the wine industry must rank among the heaviest users. But, as in everything else, some of that idyllic, pre-industrial past is invented – and even more of it is irrelevant. Does it matter if many people drank a lot of oxidised Roditis for a long time? Is there a point in wine whose whole function, production, and even conception, was radically different from the one we seek today?
The wilful expunction of internationalisation and modernity from the narrative obliterates the actual history. Greek vinous production as we understand it today, as a source of excellent, exciting, and often underpriced wines, owes as much to Cabernet Sauvignon as to Agiorgitiko, to Merlot as to Xinomavro. The consistent availability of quality local Bordeaux blends goes back to the mid-1980s and, interestingly, can be found all over the country. To an extent, the modern Greek wine scene, its concept of connoisseurship and investment, can be tracked to those. Is a Bordeaux blend an authentic Greek wine then or not? It very definitely would be to most Greeks over 30, but many of my non-Greek friends disagree. Like me in the Cyclades, when they say they want the authentic experience, they mean, consciously or not, that they want the tourist experience. An artificial construct that corresponds to a preconceived folklore, and allows them the illusion they are experiencing something different, with no commonality to their everyday.
Hold on, hold on, I hear the responses coming in. It is not we only expect to drink Merlot from the Right Bank. We drink French varieties from California to Australia, South Africa to Chile. If Greek Bordeaux blends were any good, we would know it. To which the answer can only be, would you? Availability follows the market, the market follows a good story, and these days the story is pastoral. Then, there is a particularity of Greek wine exports, the Greek Exception, if you will. In stark contrast to Spain, France, or Italy, Greek wine largely remains something that is consumed locally, not internationally. To the occasional exasperation of foreign buyers, there are many producers for whom the domestic market is the driver, or even the height of their ambition. Looking at Greek wine locally and abroad can occasionally feel like looking at two parallel scenes.
After this diatribe, you might be thinking, Pharos, you still haven’t told us if Greek Bordeaux blends are any good compared to those we usually drink. In lieu of a response, I have another rock bar anecdote. I live in Birmingham now. Rob Halford was born in Sutton Coldfield, and Robert Plant in West Brom. There is a Black Sabbath bridge on Broad Street and Napalm Death is considered a normal name for a band. I rarely make it to hard rock venues these days, but a musician acquaintance did drag me out to a well-known spot a couple of months back. Was this place, in this mecca to the genre, better than the one in Mykonos all those years ago? You know what, I am not so sure.
Photo by Dimitris Kiriakakis on Unsplash