How to seek out bears in Greece

Christos had told me that, as well as sheep, wolves love to eat grapes – they’re full of vitamins and clean the blood, apparently. Well, I’d drink to that, preferably a nice xinomavro at the Alpha Wine Estate in Amyndeon, the smallest, coldest, driest appellation in Greece. Small, perhaps, but not insignificant. Alpha’s founders picked this location – a prehistoric lakebed, surrounded by mountains – for its singular geomorphology and climate.

They cultivated and experimented for ten years before actually producing their first bottle, and continue to use the latest technology to create award-winning wines. When I arrived at the very large, very pink winery, all was quiet.

“We’ve been harvesting for five weeks and just finished an hour ago,” explained Konstantinos Arvanitakis, Alpha’s export manager, before taking me on a tour around the estate. They don’t get bears here. “Tortoises and hedgehogs nest on the vineyard,” Kostas told me, “and we’ve found two pieces of mammoth.”

Neat leafy lines stretched across the plains, to the point where the land fell away to the valley below. Alpha grows nine varieties of grape in all, including ‘sour black’ xinomavro and white malagouzia; most are recently planted, though there is a 100-year-old vine on site. “It’s very low yield,” said Kostas, “but produces the best dry Greek red.”

From the old to the uber-new, Kostas explained some of the gadgets Alpha uses: “We can monitor wine by satellite – a vine’s heat profile tells us when grapes are ready.” And then there was the WineScan machine, which can carry out 150 micro-corrections a day during fermentation, to ensure the viticulturist gets his desired blend.

“Of course, the machine doesn’t have a nose or a mouth,” said Kostas as we stared at pages of WineScan conclusions. “You still need someone to taste it.” That sounded more like it.

In an immodest room, heavy with accolades and framed certificates, 14 different Alpha wines and a little spittoon sat waiting. Challenge accepted. Gulping the gamut from reds via roses and whites to dessert wines, my mouth wrestled with wintry black fruits, strawberries and roses, pineapple and mangoes, quince and honey.

The winner, in my book, was the Alpha Xinomavro 2010 Reserve, with its savoury undertones of olives and tomatoes. It would have been just perfect, in fact, for a picnic under an oak tree, with a large, fresh porcini and the company of bears and wolves.

This article was first published in 2016 and updated in 2022