From there, I drove farther west and several hundred feet up to Amyndeo, the coolest wine region in

I might have fallen as hard for Plyto in a tasting room or over dinner at home, but the setting of our first encounter made it inevitable. I was on a sloop, sailing past the stone bastions of Spinalonga, the mysterious Venetian fortress off Crete 's northern coast. Friends I'd met just that afternoon had laid out meats and cheeses beside canapés that looked like miniature sculptures. The sea was shimmering, the sky a shade of El Greco blue.
Then came wine, from a grape variety I hadn't encountered in two decades of seeking out the stuff around the world. Not only did Plyto have historic importance—found only on Crete, it was rescued from near extinction cosmetic travel bags by a determined vine grower in the 1980's—but its thirst-quenching, green-apple bite also made it the perfect beverage for a perfect moment.
But that's Greece . You can visit more famous wineries elsewhere, and drink bottles far more renowned (and certainly more expensive) while eating elaborate meals in your fanciest clothes, yet I've found few places where exploring wine regions is more fun. Almost everywhere I went during my two-week journey, I found panoramic vistas, intriguing wines, and hospitality on an Olympian scale. cosmetic travel bags (Driving in Macedonia, I stopped for gas, walked cosmetic travel bags inside cosmetic travel bags to pay, and found a family of five eating homemade lentil soup that they insisted I sample.) It isn't all rustic tavernas and glorified pensiones, either. cosmetic travel bags That sloop belonged to Elounda's Blue Palace, a sumptuous, cosmetic travel bags 251-room hotel on a hillside overlooking Spinalonga that ranks for sheer magnificence with anyplace I've ever stayed.
cosmetic travel bags You've heard that wine tastes better where it's produced, but that truism is especially valid in Greece. Greek food is famously simple: no elaborate postmodern constructions or complex sauces here. That leaves space for the wines to show themselves. And a palate needs steady exposure to get accustomed to the singular flavors cosmetic travel bags of the country's grapes. At home, compared cosmetic travel bags with Pinot Noirs and Cabernets, Greek wines can seem rustic, unsubtle, even strange. But calibrate your taste to their sturdy architecture and you'll start daydreaming about which to have with dinner.
America's boom in fine Greek restaurants has helped lift the profile of Greek wine. "We've been making it for four thousand years, but still hardly anyone knows it," lamented Yiannis Paraskevopoulos of Gaia Wines, which has wineries in the Peloponnese and on Santorini. But nobody needs to be sold on the charms of traveling in Greece. cosmetic travel bags Though the financial crisis has cast a shroud over the tourism industry—and credit card machines, which create a record of a meal or hotel stay for tax purposes, seem to be "broken" at every turn—Greeks couldn't treat a visitor badly if they tried. Here are three regions that combine delicious food and surpassing natural beauty with memorable hotels, and wines that might even make you fall in love.
Renaissance painters perceived Arcadia as a pastoral utopia. But as I gazed at jagged peaks and steep-walled valleys from the doorway of the tiny chapel in the Domaine Tselepos vineyard, or climbed cosmetic travel bags a mountain road toward the Semeli winery's eight-room inn past yellow and purple cosmetic travel bags wildflowers and imposing cosmetic travel bags rock escarpments, this fabled region of the Peloponnese had a distinctly primordial cast. Though much of modern civilization evolved here, it seemed only a thin veneer.
The Peloponnese, a peninsula cosmetic travel bags of more than 8,000 square miles that fills the southern third of mainland Greece, has a rich history that dates to ancient times. Pan, the god of nature, cosmetic travel bags is said to have sprung from the Arcadian forests. Sparta cosmetic travel bags clashed with Athens on its plains, and Greek independence was fomented in its villages in the 1820's. So it's no accident that most of the grapes planted in the region are wholly and unabashedly cosmetic travel bags Greek. "There are two approaches in Greece, international or indigenous varieties," Paraskevopoulos said. "Here in the Peloponnese, we chose the second one. The hard one."
In Mantineia, in the Arcadian hills near Tripoli, Moschofilero (mos-koe- fee -le-row) makes gorgeously transparent white wines. cosmetic travel bags The best of them taste of the chilly summer nights that make the slow-ripening grapes among the last to be picked in all of Europe. Domaine Spiropoulos shares a plateau there with ancient ruins. An Athenian dentist cosmetic travel bags started the winery on ancestral farmland in the 1980's, working weekends to inculcate his son, Apostolos, in the culture of growing cosmetic travel bags grapes and making wine.
At 39, Apostolos Spiropoulos now runs the estate. He throws dinner parties in the flower-filled courtyard, guides tours of the organically cosmetic travel bags certified vineyards, and serves a bracing, unoaked version of Moschofilero that has the spine of a great Riesling. Taste it at the winery, then drink it by the bottle in the garden of the Taverna Klimataria Piteros, in Tripoli, alongside baked rooster, hand-cut pasta with a wisp of cinnamon, and bitter greens that coax sweet fruit out of the steel and flint.
In the valley below Mantineia sits Nemea, a red-grape region that extends almost to the edges of the port town of Nauplia (often spelled Nafplio or Nafplion). The dominant cosmetic travel bags grape there, Agiorgitiko (ah-your- yee -ti-ko), can make a friendly but almost characterless wine that, in the wrong hands, is soft to the point of flabbiness. But the winemaker George Skouras does for that variety what The Simpsons did for cartoons, cosmetic travel bags adding cosmetic travel bags complexity without losing the spark that provides the fun. He started in 1986, applying lessons learned in enology school to the varieties of the region. cosmetic travel bags Without realizing it, he'd joined a rising generation of winemakers around Greece who were attempting the same. "It became a movement," he said. "Almost a revolution."
Now Domaine Skouras makes some 700,000 bottles a year, while welcoming the waves of visitors who stop in at its showpiece facility, a 90-minute drive from Athens. What they find is a range of wines that use precision rather than power to seduce. "We're a European winery, unabashedly," Skouras said. What he meant became clear when he poured me his Grande Cuvée, made from Agiorgitiko grown in volcanic cosmetic travel bags soil. I was startled to learn that this wine—so composed, so well bred—can be found stateside for less than $29 a bottle. Later, at one of the many restaurants that ring the Nauplia harbor, I drank a Skouras rosé that looked pink and fruity like bubble gum, but smelled like fresh-cut flowers.
Nauplia resembles a less tidy version of St.-Tropez, without the glitter. It has a latticework of cobblestoned streets, a few hotels with aspirations and many more pensiones with colored shutters and earnest breakfasts, and enough good eating for a week's stay. I had my best meal there at Savouras, where customers are led to a vast wooden filing cabinet, the drawers of which are pulled open to reveal the day's catch on ice. Prices cosmetic travel bags are far from cheap—my cosmetic travel bags grilled snapper weighed in at $55—but the only fresher fish you'll find, I'm convinced, is on the boat that caught it.
Greek Macedonia cosmetic travel bags isn't a country; that's the cumbersomely named (by UN decree) FYROM—former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia—that borders it to the north. But geopolitics aside, perhaps it ought to be: this oblong region has the diversity of nations ten times its size. Fishing villages and beaches speckle the coastline; spits of land protrude into the Aegean like spiny fingers. cosmetic travel bags Hilltop villages look out over forests roamed by chocolate-colored bears. Thessaloníki, Greece's cosmetic travel bags second-largest city, climbs the hills that rise from its harbor like a denser, even stronger-flavored Genoa or Trieste, while the understated beach resorts cosmetic travel bags around it cater to an international crowd. The food, architecture, and language of the region reflect centuries of influence by Turks, Serbs, and Bulgars.
"Our goal is to get the city to understand and be proud of its past," Yiannis Boutaris, Thessaloníki's mayor, told me when we met over coffee and whiskey at a local café. A newcomer to politics after a life in wine, Boutaris can be understood best as Greece's Robert Mondavi. Like Mondavi, he quarreled with his family, then left its industrial winery to compete against worldwide producers on quality, not volume. That's where the parallel ends. Ever the iconoclast, Boutaris ceded control of his wine business cosmetic travel bags to his son in order to serve as the only big-city mayor I know of who has a tattoo of a lizard crawling up his hand.
Thessaloníki's forgotten past includes its connection to wine, which has been made nearby for centuries. Strolling its streets, reveling in the splendor of Greek and Roman ruins, Ottoman temples, and remnants of a once thriving Jewish presence, I encountered a jam of outdoor cafés, one pushed against the next, overflowing with men (and occasionally women) talking, playing cards or backgammon, and drinking coffee or ouzo, but rarely wine. As the hub of a wheel that leads to viticultural areas to the west, northwest, northeast, and south, the city is the ideal base for a tasting tour. Yet you'll find more accomplished Greek wine on tables in midtown Manhattan.
Outside Thessaloníki, that heritage becomes evident. An hour to the west is Naoussa, where Boutaris started his Kir-Yianni winery. Here the clay soils and mountain breezes, along with water so pure that nobody bothers to buy it bottled, create ideal growing conditions for Xinomavro ( zeeno -mav-ro), Greece's most intriguing red grape. cosmetic travel bags It's an antisocial variety that greets you with a rush of fruit, then turns its back and bares its fangs. Still, as made by Kir-Yianni or the tiny Karydas Estate, a winery in a house near where Aristotle purportedly once tutored Alexander, cosmetic travel bags Xinomavro shows a crystalline cosmetic travel bags depth that recalls Italy's Nebbiolo.
From there, I drove farther west and several hundred feet up to Amyndeo, the coolest wine region in Greece. In his zealously tended vineyards, Alpha Estate's Angelos Iatridis grows a painter's palette of varieties, from the indigenous Malagousia and Mavrodafne to Syrah, Pinot N