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Santorini in peril – a vintner's lament

Yiannis Paraskevopoulos, one of the real stars of modern Greek wine, sent me the following report of a particularly disastrous 2002 vintage (and I have heard similar tales of the rest of Greece):

Harvest has been a disastrous one and it is only now that I managed to pull myself back to a normal rhythm.

In fact the total vineyard on the island of Santorini didn't yield more than 800kg/ha (6hl/ha!) obliging us to produce less than half of what we had planned [Gaia makes that delicious Thalassitis dry white from Assirtiko vines on this volcanic island]. The reasons for...