Four bottles that explain the island — and the villages they come from
Cyprus has been making wine for something close to five thousand years, and for most of that time it made a great deal of it quietly, in bulk, for somebody else. That has changed. Small estates in the Troodos foothills have gone back to the island’s own grapes, and the bottles worth crossing the island for are now the ones you cannot buy anywhere else.
Two things set these vineyards apart before a cork is pulled. Phylloxera — the aphid that destroyed most of Europe’s vineyards in the nineteenth century and forced everything to be replanted on American rootstock — never reached Cyprus, so the vines here still grow on their own roots. And they grow high: the good sites sit between roughly 600 and 1,400 metres, where cold nights hold the acidity in grapes ripening under a Cypriot sun.
Commandaria — a wine with centuries of history
Commandaria is a sweet amber wine, and it is very probably the oldest named wine still in production anywhere in the world. The name is Crusader: the Knights Hospitaller held a Grande Commanderie in the hills above Limassol in the thirteenth century, and the wine took its name from the estate. The wine itself is a great deal older than the name.
It tastes of dried figs, brown sugar and walnut, with enough acidity underneath that it never turns cloying. Serve it cool in a small glass after dinner — with a hard cheese, with anything involving dark chocolate, or on its own while the rest of the table is still finishing.
Xynisteri — a Cypriot white wine
Xynisteri is the island’s most planted white grape and, for a long time, its most underrated — the workhorse nobody bothered to make properly. Picked early and handled with care it gives a dry, light-bodied white of citrus peel, green melon and a faint chalkiness: closer to a good Assyrtiko than to anything from northern Europe, and completely at home with the food it grew up beside.
It is also the wine that changes most with altitude. The same grape from Pitsilia at a thousand metres and from a coastal vineyard are two different drinks — one taut and mineral, the other softer and rounder. Ask where the fruit came from; on this island that question means something.
Maratheftiko: deep colour, black fruit, a peppery finish — and a yield no grower can rely on.
Maratheftiko is the island’s serious red: dense colour, black fruit, fine tannin, a peppery finish, and the structure to age. It is also botanically awkward. The variety has female flowers and cannot pollinate itself — it sets fruit only when another variety that flowers at the same time is planted among it. Growers interplant it with Xynisteri or Spourtiko and accept an unreliable harvest.
That is why you so often meet it blended, usually with Cabernet Sauvignon or Shiraz, and why a good single-varietal Maratheftiko costs what it does. Drink it with slow-cooked lamb, with kleftiko, with anything that has spent four hours in an oven.
The label says it plainly: γλυκύς — sweet — from ηλιαστά σταφύλια, sun-dried grapes.
The Ayia Mavri winery sits in Koilani, at around 900 metres in the wine villages above Limassol, and it is known almost entirely for one wine: a naturally sweet Moschato pressed from sun-dried Muscat of Alexandria. It pours gold, smells of orange blossom, apricot and honey, and is saved from being syrup by a thin line of acidity running underneath.
It has taken gold at Muscats du Monde, and it is the bottle most likely to convert a visitor who is certain they do not like dessert wine. Cold, small glass, with a fruit tart or the cheese board.
Where to drink them
The wineries are the point. Most of the good ones are small and family-run, and they are strung along the Krasochoria — the wine villages on the southern slopes of Troodos above Limassol. Omodos has the cobbled square and the monastery at the centre of it; Lania has the painted doors and the courtyards; Koilani, Vouni and Lofou are twenty minutes from either. Harvest runs from roughly August into October, earlier on the coast and later the higher you climb, and it is both the busiest and the best time to be there.
Lofou, in the Krasochoria. The vine over the lane is the whole idea of the place.
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