Greek wine: betwixt and between

Wines & Vines, March, 2004 by Miles Lambert-Gocs

With the summer 2004 Athens Olympics on the horizon, the Greek wine industry is looking forward to its greatest opportunity to showcase its progress over the past two decades. Certainly, the games will yield a triumph in domestic sales and consumption, but it remains to be seen whether there will be a lasting benefit to the industry from foreign visitors' contact with Greek wine. A lot depends on what sort of impression is left after the bottles have been drained and the visitors have gone home, and the chances are that the impressions are going to be very uneven, reflecting the mixed state of mind that typifies the Greek industry itself.

Greek wine producers have been prone to take cues from developments abroad. International grape varieties, estate/domain production, organic farming, maximally cold-fermented white wines, minimally oak-aged reds, etc.--all have their enthusiastic champions in Greece. And many producers feel their philosophies have been vindicated by medals and certificates won at international competitions. But at the same time, their confidence is nagged by the intractable fact that, overall, premium Greek wine remains a hard sell outside Greece.

The Greek wine industry is caught in a marketing vise. On the one hand, Greek wines from international varieties are not lively sellers in retail stores abroad because of relatively high prices. How often is a consumer going to choose a Greek Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon at $15-17 over very representative varietal wines from his own country or elsewhere at $10-14? Wine aficionados in particular are likely to note ruefully that they do not find an extra $3-5 worth of terroir over the competition. By far the most dependable outlet for Greek Cabs, Chards, etc., is through overseas Greek restaurants, since some diners will prefer a familiar varietal wine at any cost.

On the other hand, the wines from native Greek varieties stand little chance of having their unfamiliar names catch on in foreign markets. Their best shot for respectable sales is the long shot of achieving brand recognition--in other words, recognition having nothing to do with varietal composition. These wines additionally face the hurdle of pleasing influential journalist pundits who, for all their imputed palate sophistication, tend to buckle intellectually under the perceptual strain of unaccustomed tints, aromas and flavors, and accordingly, broadcast relatively low scores.

Given this unenviable marketing crunch, the Greek wine industry has to depend on its own marketing skills to get things right promotionally and make the international audience for wine take note of what it has to offer. But as of this writing, producers as a class are still in disarray as to where to take Greek wine. Some of the issues, of course, are familiar from the experience of other countries that have stepped onto the stage of world-class wine in recent decades--but always with peculiarly Greek twists.

Foremost, Greece is not recognizing, much less addressing, the issue of whether or not to be a "Mediterranean" wine producer and proud of it, which is the basic dilemma confronting the industry. This issue instead is obscured by superficial debate over whether or not, and where, to grow international varieties. In fact, Greece's identity as a wine country is impacted by more than just the varietal question.

The issue of Mediterranean versus "continental" wine has not been unique to Greece. Both Italy and Spain, notably, have also had to deal with it. But the pressure to reconfigure and market itself as a continental competitor is far greater in the case of Greece, because of its geographic location together with the timing of its re-emergence as an estimable producer of bottled wine.

Greece's vinous rebirth happens to be coinciding with the refurbishing and reorganization of the wine industries in the formerly communist areas to its north that are strictly continental producers (excepting only Dalmatia and Albania). Further, most of those lands have a leg up on Greece, because countrywide decisions regarding grape varieties and their appropriate geographic distribution were made through expert viticultural research and implemented by command during the communist period, no matter the deficiencies in their wine industries as a whole.

The identity crisis of the Greek wine industry is manifested mostly, though somewhat cryptically, in connection with geographical names. At this juncture, place names carry an almost obsessive significance to Greek producers in both the private and cooperative sectors, but when it comes to the products, the industry does not really live up to the profusion of geographic names; that is, there is a significant gap between the desire and the framework to exploit the extremely variegated Greek landscape in commercial bottled wine. (The contrast with the former communist countries, which have very manageably-sized portfolios of geographic delimitations, is marked.)

More specifically, while the appellation of origin concept (known by its acronym OPAP in Greek) has been treated with circumspection, the country wine (topikos oinos) concept has been used promiscuously. The country wine designations range in size from whole provinces to minuscule areas. The provincial names are well-known ones, like Peloponnesos, and encompass an array of Greek and foreign grape varieties, all with the intention of not leaving anyone out in terms of marketing advantage. In contrast, the minuscule ones feature geographic or topographic names unknown even to many Greeks, which have been created at the behest of, and for the benefit of, particular wine firms and vineyard estates.