IkariaThe Testflight

The wine

Named before names mattered

Homer put Pramnian wine in his poetry before the seventh century BC, which makes it roughly the oldest brand anyone can still point at. It came from Pramnia Petra, above a village the Greeks called Oinois and now call Evdilos, and historians tend to treat it as the first wine anywhere named for the ground it came from rather than the man selling it.

Then everyone took the name. Pramnian turned up on other islands, then on the mainland, until it stopped meaning a place and started meaning a style — which is what happens to every good idea in wine eventually. Raisins kept the vines alive through the seventeenth century. Then phylloxera landed in 1910 and took the island from nearly a thousand hectares down to the hundred that are still here.

The grapes

Granite, and three varieties

There is no flat ground on Ikaria. The island surfaces from the same undersea range as Samos and Fournoi but was given none of the plains, so the vines sit on terraces cut into granite — which is exactly as much work as it sounds.

Ikaria · SRTM 30 m terrain

How it ran

Wednesday to Saturday

• Wednesday, onto the island and up to Karimalis at Pigi. Organic, family-run, an unfiltered orange wine. They fed us as well.
• Thursday at Afianes, above Raches. Biodynamic. Sparkling wine finishing its second fermentation underwater, old vines going into clay pitharia buried in the ground, and an amphitheatre cut in above the vineyard. They fed us too.
• Friday at Tsantiris, at Proespera. Most of it made by hand, and most of it never leaves the island. Three wineries, which on Ikaria is all of the industry, and off on Saturday.