Vineyards and wine tasting

With our last full day of Santorini (or it's official name - Thira) we are going on a wine tasting tour. We got to see 3 different wineries all with some awesome views.

We learned a lot about wine growing here in Santorini - as I mentioned in a previous post the vineyards of Santorini were saved from the main disease that killed off most vines in Europe. Santorini was saved because of its volcanic soil! This means they have super old vineyards and we got to try some wine from 200+ year old vines!

Some other cool quirks with the volcanic soil and location:
- they grow the grapes in nests to shelter the vines from the wind and heat
- they only have ~5% of vines grown on trellises (they call them experimental)
- they rarely irrigate the field and instead rely on the pummus in the soil to collect moisture over night and release it during the day
- all the grapes are unique to the island and they have 40+ varieties

We ended the day with some pool time and food of course. On to Crete tomorrow!Read more