Haridimos Hatzidakis may well represent the future of the wine industry on the picturesque Greek island of Santorini. He was the first to see the potential in dry wine made from the red Mavrotragano grape, the first to bottle Mavrotragano, the first in perhaps a century to plant it in a vineyard of its own.

Yet when Hatzidakis pulls up to his ramshackle winery – near Pyrgos, on Santorini's west coast – in a battered truck, with unkempt hair and a stained shirt, he issues a preemptive warning. "We don't often invite people to come here," he says.

It soon becomes evident why. Aboveground, Hatzidakis Winery is a cluster of shacks with mismatched walls. Below, rank smells permeate a cave filled with a jumble of winemaking equipment. "Moisture," says Hatzidakis as he pushes through to a small tasting room carved deep into the volcanic rock.

Somehow, the 38-year-old Hatzidakis and his wife, Konstantina, manage to make 50,000 bottles a year of export-caliber wine in the semi-darkness. That includes nearly 5,000 bottles – the largest production by any winery – of the mysterious Mavrotragano, a red grape of unknown origin.

"There's no DNA information on Mavrotragano at all," says Mihalis Boutaris, an American-trained viticulturist and winemaker who works with the Kiryianni and the Boutari wineries on research and development. "Scientifically, all we can really say is that here is a red wine from Santorini. Beyond that, we don't know." Found sparingly on Santorini and nowhere else in the world, Mavrotragano had never been sold as a dry wine before Hatzidakis attempted it in 1999 with wine from the 1997 vintage.

Making a wine from such an untested commodity would be difficult enough in a modern winery, with clean floors and the latest monitoring equipment. In this setting, Hatzidakis might as well be boiling a potion in a witches' cauldron. Konstantina shrugs. "Two crazy people," she says. "But we started without money. What could we do?"

Yet since the 1997 vintage, when Hatzidakis' experiment began, Mavrotragano has managed to attract interest from around the world. After tasting the wine's singular flavor, with notes of Nebbiolo and Pinot Noir but an essence all its own, the Italian Slow Food organization officially recognized the grape as worthy of protection. Enologists and journalists have made pilgrimages to the dank cave. "It's definitely the buzzword in Greece," says Boutaris.

And on the island, which has heretofore been known only for white wines, it has helped to start a trend. "Now everyone has started to plant Mavrotragano," says Paris Sigalas, who was one of the first. A renowned enologist with far better distribution for his wines than Hatzidakis has, his sanction helped validate the Mavrotragano movement.

On the northeast corner of Santorini, where the trappings of tourism haven't penetrated and the island retains an austere beauty, Sigalas sits on his patio, surrounded by a vineyard of experimental Mavrotragano. His vines are planted not close to the ground in a nest or basket formation as is usual on the island, but upright, attached to posts. "I don't think the traditional way is the best way to grow red grapes," he says.

Sigalas experimented with sweet Mavrotragno as early as 1982. Since 1998, he has been producing small quantities of dry wine from the grape. The vines in his own vineyard only started to produce grapes last year, so he's had to source his fruit in tiny lots from among nearly 1,000 vineyards owned by individual farmers around the island. That mitigates any possibility of sense of place showing through, and leaves him at the mercy of growers who may be more interested in volume than quality. Nevertheless, he can sense the possibilities inherent in the variety. "Even though we collect grapes from here and there, we can see that we can make a very interesting wine," he says.

Between them, Hatzidakis and Sigalas have turned this small resort island with centuries of white wine tradition into a fascinating laboratory for an heirloom grape. To do it, they've had to challenge not just tradition, but the laws of nature and economics.
"The enologists at the bigger wineries held the wineries back," Sigalas says now. "They weren't so enthusiastic about Mavrotragano. They thought the conditions weren't right for red wine. Now they see that it will change the image of Santorini's wines. Not just its red wines, but all its wines."

* * *

Until recently, anyone attempting to find a vineyard of Mavrotragano on Santorini would have been disappointed. No vineyard that consisted solely of a red variety existed on the island.

Instead, Mavrotragano usually grows intermingled with Santorini's other grapes (notably the white Assyrtiko, Athiri and Aidani, and the red Mandalaria and Voudomato) in the decades-old vineyards that provide this stark, sere island with much of its vegetation. Its traditional use is in a homemade sweet wine that is rarely bottled.

As late as the 1930s, vast plantings of Mavrotragano were said to have covered Santorini. These were pulled out, little by little, in times of one economic crisis or another, in favor of either hotel development or the more dependably revenue-producing Assyrtiko. By 2000, Mavrotragano accounted for less than two percent of the island's annual harvest – and Mandalaria, the favored red variety, not much more than that. Red wines on Santorini seemed in danger of extinction.

To many minds, that wouldn't have been much of a loss. Conventional wisdom states that Santorini, which has irregular temperatures during the growing season and winds fierce enough to shred a flag on its flagpole, will never produce a great red wine. The majority of that wisdom has come from producers of Mandalaria, a difficult-to-ripen variety that rarely reaches its full potential on Santorini. "I love Mandalaria," says Nico Manessis, one of the foremost experts on Greek wine, "but not there."

Several of Santorini's producers make a passable Mandalaria, but almost nobody believes that it can lift the image of Santorini's reds any higher than it already has – which isn't high at all. "We try," says producer George Gavalas. "but Mandalaria doesn't help us."

In truth, the island does have some conditions that are propitious for red wines. The phylloxera louse that ravaged most other grape-growing regions around the world couldn't gain a foothold in the volcanic soil, so Santorini's vineyards remain uninfected. And though no rain typically falls from February through October, the low-lying clouds that roll in off the sea often blanket vineyards with moisture. "It hasn't rained, but we wake up in the morning and the vineyards are wet," says Hatzidakis.

Still, the vast majority of Santorini's production has always been white. Only one appellation exists on the island, and only one wine is sanctioned. It must consist of at least 90 percent of Assyrtiko grape, blended if desired with Athiri and Aidani. If you make wines using any other kinds of grapes, you aren't permitted to use the Santorini name on your label.

Accordingly, most of the island's wineries have always figured that reds, difficult to make and almost impossible to market without the Santorini name, were barely worth the trouble. "I haven't promoted my red wine," says Kostas Antoniou, a jeweler and part-time winemaker who makes one of the island's best Mandalarias for his Antoniou Wines. "Santorini is famous for its white wines, so most people don't bother with the red. Besides, they like to drink white wines. It's hot here."

Until 1995, no professional winemaker had ever made a dry Mavrotragano. That's when Hatzidakis, then working for Boutari, Greece's second-largest and most commercially active winery, convinced the company to experiment with the grape. Born in Crete, Hatzidakis had studied in Athens, then started his Boutari career in 1991. After several successful vintages in Crete, he was posted to Santorini. At the time, he had never tasted dry Mavrotragano, or even spoken with anyone who'd tasted it. But he had a hunch.

When Boutari's chief enologist sourced a small amount of Mavrotragno for experimental purposes, Hatzidakis convinced him to make the wine dry instead of sweet. One taste in the tank led him to believe he'd discovered something. But instead of bottling the wine, Boutari kept it in oak for four years, destroying the delicate balance of fruit and tannin.

By then, Hatzidakis had left the company and put out two vintages of Mavrotragano on his own. That 1997, made in a tiny quantity, was likely the first bottled Mavrotragano produced anywhere in the world. It was a wine with far softer tannins and lower acidity than Mandalaria, and with better character. It had a mouthfeel similar to Nebbiolo, a flavor profile all its own, and intimations of real depth. Hatzidakis was thrilled.

Hard as it might be to believe, Sigalas lived and worked on the same small island without having any idea of what Hatzidakis was up to. The first time he can recall hearing about the Hatzidakis Mavrotragano was when it showed up in the marketplace.
He, too, had wondered how Mavrotragano might taste as a dry wine, but he'd never had space in his winery to find out.

In 1997, he'd moved into a new facility in Oia, on the island's northeast coast. Beginning the following year, he bought a small amount of Mavrotragano, fermented it, and waited. With his first taste of the wine, he says, "I decided at once I needed money to plant a vineyard of Mavrotragano," he says. By 2000, he'd done exactly that.

* * *

Several years ago, a group of producers from Italy's Langhe region – including Barolo's near-legendary Elio Altare – visited Santorini to look at red wines. They were intrigued by the possibilities inherent in the volcanic soil. They tasted the minerally whites and figured the same qualities could be imparted in the red. To their palates, too, Mavrotragano reminded them of their own Nebbiolo.

In most areas of the world, interested outsiders who sense a potential in the soil are often persuaded to invest, plant a vineyard, and try growing grapes and making wine for themselves. That's how wine regions from Spain's Priorat to Chile's Maipo Valley were jump-started. But on Santorini, any land within sight of water is worth far more as a hotel than a vineyard – and nearly everywhere on the island is within sight of water. There's plenty of foreign investment in Santorini, but none of it is in vineyard land.

At the same time, budding hotel impresarios have had little difficulty persuading locals to sell vineyards that may have been in their families for centuries. Who can resist getting several years' salary for a few hectares of painfully difficult land? Accordingly, the amount of vineyard land on Santorini has dwindled precipitously. About 150 years ago, between half and two-thirds of the island's 7,500 hectares were covered with grapevines. By 1975, once Santorini had been discovered as a resort destination, that number had dwindled to 2,000 hectares. Today the area of cultivation is about 1,200 hectares.

Many growers who elected to keep their vineyards have attempted to compensate for the money they're missing by increasing yields. The grapes that have resulted are weak, watery and characterless. "It is not a good thing," says Hatzidakis, who started trying to buy grapes for his own, fledgling winery in 1997 and has notice a palpable decline in quality as land prices have increased. "They want to earn more money from the same amount of land. But these are grapes I don't want."

Like Sigalas, Hatzidakis knew he needed grapes of his own. In 2000, he purchased a hardscrabble patch of terraced vineyard land on a north-facing hillside in a less developed area of the island. He proceeded to plant it entirely to Mavrotragano. Three years later, he added an adjacent plot, interspersing tomato plants among the vines.

He stands there now, the wind pushing his hair to the back of his head, and rhapsodizes about the site he has found. In the distance, the Christiana Islands shimmer in the haze, but Hatzidakis has no interest in the stunning view. He's looking in the foreground, at the clumps of vines lying on the rock-strewn soil. "Spaced close together, like in Burgundy," he says, indicating with a sweep of his arm. If all goes well, his output of Mavrotragano will soon double. "We saved the grape," Konstantina says.

Along the way, they may have saved Santorini's red wine industry. Every producer who makes Mavrotragano sold every bottle he released last year. Taken together, it's merely a tiny percentage of the Assyrtiko-based Santorini wine that is the mainstay of the island, but a market now exists where it previously didn't.

And production is set to grow. Sigalas added to his 2000 plantings in 2001 and 2002 and now has a total of five hectares of the variety. From 400 bottles in 1998, he made 2,000 bottles of the 2003 vintage, and that amount will double in 2004, when the first fruit from his own vineyards is included. By decade's end, his annual production may reach 10,000 bottles. His version has a mouthfeel closer to Bordeaux than Nebbiolo, and lacks the salty taste at the back of the mouth that is a hallmark of many of Santorini's wines. It is arguably the most marketable of the Mavrotraganos internationally, yet nobody would mistake it for an internationally styled wine.

Last year, even the million-bottle-a year government cooperative of Santo is released a small amount of varietal Mavrotragano. "If enough people start making serious Mavrotragano," says Nikos Varvarigos, Santo's enologist, "we will attempt to make the wine an appellation wine. If that happens, we will be able to use the name Santorini on our labels. And if that happens, who knows?"

Even Boutari, the large winery that kept Hatzidakis's experimental Mavrotragano in oak for four years, has made the decision to proceed with the grape. "We wanted to make a local red wine from Santorini, and Mandalaria is not so interesting," says Petros Vamvakousis, the manager of Boutari's Santorini winery, almost by way of an apology. "It would be easy for us to plant a small vineyard of Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot, but I believe it is important to make a red wine from a local variety."

Boutari's implicit sanction of the grape carries an enormous symbolic weight. The company not only has the technology to do research on the best way to make a Mavrotragano wine, but it has the marketing muscle to get the wine on shelves around the world. But until its own Mavrotragano vineyards begin producing fruit, Boutari stands as just one more buyer for a severely limited product. In the past year, the price of Mavrotragano has risen to between 2.5 and 3 Euros a kilogram, as compared to Assyrtiko, which costs 50 to 80 cents. That makes it the most expensive grape variety in all of Greece.

The ramifications are palpable. Sitting cliffside at dinner on a cool autumn night, Hatzidakis takes a sip from a glass of his own Mavrotragano and closes his eyes. His grapes don't come on line for another year, and he's hardly satisfied with the fruit he has been getting. He shakes his head at the irony. Just as it has gained currency on Santorini and beyond, the Mavrotragano made by the grape's pioneer is getting outpaced by the marketplace. He has sunk all his money into his vineyard and doesn't have the resources to improve his winery or buy the grapes he wants. His wine remains compelling, a fascinating example of a local variety amidst a sea of international wine, but to his palate it shows the difficulties.

"We have much more work to do with Mavrotragano, so much more," he says, his eyes still closed. Then he opens them and looks into his glass. "But at least I know there is a future now."

(This article originally appeared in Epikouria Magazine)

 
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