Why Indigenous Varieties Matter
Cyprus never had phylloxera. That single fact shapes everything growing here.
An island the louse never reached
From the 1860s onward phylloxera destroyed most of the vineyards of Europe. The remedy was to graft European vines onto American rootstock, which the insect cannot kill, and that is how nearly every vine in the world is planted today.
Cyprus is one of the very few places it never reached. Vines here still stand on their own roots.
What that is actually worth
It is easy to overclaim this, so plainly: nobody can prove to you that an ungrafted vine tastes different. What it certainly means is continuity. Nothing here had to be torn out and replanted, so old vines and old plant material survived where elsewhere they were lost — including varieties that existed in small enough quantities that a replanting would simply have ended them.
The varieties that survived
- Xynisteri — the most planted white on the island, and unusually good at drought. It is the base of Commandaria as well as of the modern dry whites, and in our hands it is the grape that carries the valley’s minerality.
- Maratheftiko — the noble red, and the difficult one: female flowers, uneven ripening, about one per cent of the island’s plantings.
- Giannoudi — a dark-berried red named after the vineyard it was found in, female-flowered like Maratheftiko, and rare enough that it was very nearly lost.
- Spourtiko — thin-skinned, early, and the traditional pollination partner planted alongside Maratheftiko.
- Promara, Morokanella and others — whites brought back from a handful of surviving vines in the last two decades.
Why we plant them
Partly because they are ours. Mostly because they work. These are varieties that spent centuries being selected by this heat, this drought and these soils, by people who could not irrigate and could not replant on a whim. A grape that has already solved the problem of ripening in Cyprus is a better starting point than one that solved it somewhere cooler.
There are international varieties in our cellar too, and we are not apologetic about them. But the indigenous ones are the reason a bottle from Kannaviou tastes of Kannaviou and not of anywhere else.
Back to the journal