Retsina

Resinated wine is one of the oldest continuously made wines in Greece, attested for well over two thousand years. In antiquity, before airtight barrels, wine was stored in clay amphorae whose porous walls and stoppers were sealed with Aleppo pine resin to keep out air; the resin both preserved the wine and lent it its taste. When the Romans took up wooden barrels around the third century AD, the resin was no longer needed to protect the wine, yet Greeks had come to like the flavour and kept adding it on purpose. The style settled around Attica, Boeotia and Euboea, where it remains identified to this day and is recognized in the European Union as a protected Greek designation.

The nose hits first: sharp pine, sap and a whiff of solvent over green-apple and citrus fruit. On the palate it is bracingly dry and high in acid, the resin running through as a savoury, slightly bitter, cooling streak rather than sweetness. Served very cold it is clean and almost austere, cutting through olive oil, salt and char; warm or old, the resin can turn harsh and the wine tired.

Small lumps of Aleppo pine resin are added to the grape must during fermentation, so the wine takes up the aromatic compounds of the resin as it ferments; the solids are removed before or at bottling. The resin's terpenes, the same family of compounds that scent pine forests, carry the signature aroma and also act as a mild antioxidant and preservative, the original reason for their use. Modern producers use far less resin than in the past and rely on temperature-controlled fermentation, so today's retsina is cleaner and more restrained than the heavily resined wine of older memory.