Drama& Kavala

Last time, we finished in a vineyard at Goumenissa that a man called Titos Eftichidis planted under Mount Paiko in 1972. He had died. His widow Angeliki hadn't sold it — she had handed the whole estate to two winemakers from Kavala, because one of them had been her husband's friend for most of both their lives and those were the hands she trusted.

We heard that standing in the rows, from a man who told it like an administrative detail. It's the least sentimental transaction any of us has ever been moved by.

The company those two men run is called Ktima Biblia Chora. It's where this trip starts. Two hours east out of Thessaloniki on the Egnatia, then up onto the north face of Pangeon, and the temperature drops the whole way.

All of today happens on the same short stretch of plain, and the same few names keep turning up in each other's biographies. You'll see Pavlidis first thing and then, an hour later, the man who used to run its cellar.

Or: two brothers, one plain, and an argument nobody will tell you about.

A thing about Thassos marble: cut it thin enough and the light comes through. The Romans lost their minds over it. Nicos Lazaridis spent thirty years pulling it out of an island and selling it to people who wanted their lobbies to look like the inside of an egg, and he was very good at this, and by the late seventies he was rich enough to spend real time in Tuscany.

Which is where it all goes wrong. Or right, depending how you feel about wine.

He came back with an idea everyone here thought was lunacy — that this flat, cold, tobacco-growing plain could make wine that mattered. In 1987 he and his younger brother Kostas built the first proper winery in the prefecture, and hired a young oenologist just home from Bordeaux. You met him yesterday, though you did not know it at the time.

Five years. Then they stopped. Not money — method. Which grapes, which barrels, how long in them: the kind of argument that sounds like nothing and is actually about what you think wine is for. Kostas left in 1992. By 1993 there were two companies where there had been one.

Nobody advertises this. It's on neither website and nobody will raise it today. You'll simply visit both, taste the two halves of a thirty-three-year-old disagreement, and draw your own conclusions.

One more on the plain, then three hours down the length of Macedonia — past Serres, past Thessaloniki, out to where the land runs into the sea. The drive is long and mostly dull and you'll want it anyway, for what is at the end of it.