I wasn’t surprised at the liveliness and good cheer of the inhabitants of Thessaloniki: why wouldn’t they be happy? They live in a seaside city that is neither a tourist-trap island nor the thronging capital, but has its own beaches a short drive away and more than 2,000 years of history, much of it on show in dramatic ruins and beautiful churches.
In Thessaloniki, I thought, as I cycled along the seaside boardwalk last October in a T-shirt, there is space to breathe. Still, it turned out that wasn’t the reason for the good vibes. Nor was it the amazing food, despite this being Greece’s first Unesco city of gastronomy. No, it was the caffeine.
Thessaloniki’s inhabitants are so crazy about coffee they even drink it cold, with ice and a straw. And sweet. “We don’t have blood in our veins — we have sugar!” said Anastasia Gaitanou as she guided me to the old town, past ancient city walls, parts of which date back to the 4th century BC.
We watched the sun set in glorious orange over the sea as she told me how the city was founded in about 315BC by King Cassander of Macedon and named for his wife, Thessalonike, a half-sister of Alexander the Great. Then she offered me another coffee, which would have been my third. I refused. I had come to central Macedonia in search of a different liquid: red wine from the xinomavro grape.
When I was young, the only Greek wine Brits had heard of was retsina, the one that’s perfumed — some would say adulterated — with pine resin. I remember my father, on a holiday to Skiathos during my teens, braving it the way I might have risked asking a boy to dance at the disco. He offered me a sip, and it was truly horrible — not something I wanted to drink, even at an age where all free alcohol was good alcohol.
These days, you can find good retsina and, thanks to the cool, mineral-dry whites of Santorini, people have been persuaded to take the country’s wine seriously. There are more than 300 indigenous grape varieties, including xinomavro, which has its homeland in Naoussa, just an hour’s drive west of Thessaloniki. Despite a name that means bitter (xino) and black (mavro), it is actually red, perfumed, and when made well, absolutely gorgeous. I had come to spend a few days exploring Naoussa and its xinomavro on a new wine trail. The Greek tourism board has created maps to guide thirsty visitors round the region, with pointers to the best vineyards (tasting prices vary; don’t forget to book). You might stay in Naoussa or dip in and out from Thessaloniki.
There were plenty of opportunities for preliminary research in the city. Next to the remains of an ancient Roman palace that seemed to have been plonked casually among the apartment blocks, we found Alea, the kind of tiny, hole-in-the-wall wine bar I could live in. The walls were bright scarlet, covered with stills from old films; the wines were superb, with indigenous grapes from all over Greece, including a powerful xinomavro, a mouthful of wild dark berries, from Dalamara, one of the Naoussa vineyards I intended to visit.
An hour’s drive across the plain, in sight of Mount Olympus, where the ancient Greeks believed the gods resided, are hillsides with tiny villages and broad vineyards. These are the lower slopes of the Vermio Mountains, which protect the vineyards from northerly winds and provide snowmelt for the thirsty grapes. Naoussa is the name of a village and Greece’s first wine PDO (the EU quality designation).
This isn’t the only place to find vineyards — Gerovassiliou, with its lovely vineyard restaurant and a museum of the owner’s 2,600-strong collection of corkscrews, is 30 minutes’ drive from the city and 15 from the beach. But for a wine-lover to come to Thessaloniki without visiting Naoussa would be like a coffee fan depriving themselves of the city’s great cafés. Gaitanou can organise tours of the Naoussa region from Thessaloniki, from £220 for up to ten people (anastasia2570@yahoo.com).
My first stop was the winery of the marvellously named Apostolos Thymiopoulos, who is largely responsible for xinomavro’s growing reputation in the UK. He is a genial man in his forties with excellent English and even better wines, and we sat on his small terrace tasting xinomavros that range from the juicy (and affordable) Earth and Sky to the tiny production single-vineyard wines. There was also an astonishing rosé that is one of the finest pink wines I’ve ever tasted, although it’s more orange-gold than pink. “In Thessaloniki it used to be more prestigious to ask for a cabernet or a syrah,” said Apostolos. He is changing that.
We drove on to Kir-Yianni, a much bigger operation with a lovely tasting room, and sat outside in the gentle sunshine, sampling our wines alongside a delicious platter of meatballs. A large staff group eating at the next table passed around magnums: clearly, this is a good place to work. Nowhere was too far: it’s possible to visit four vineyards in a day.
I decided to take it easier and make multiple visits from my base in Thessaloniki. It meant I could stop off near Naoussa for a short walk around the Nymphaeum of Mieza, a peaceful green clearing with the traces of the buildings where Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great. Then I went on to taste the lovely wines at tiny Dalamara and then the even tinier Foundi, where the owners brought out old vintages to prove how well xinomavro can age. It also enabled me to take an hour’s detour, to Pella, capital of the ancient kingdom of Macedon, and Alexander’s birthplace.
It is amazing to think that this place, which is now nearly 25 miles from the sea, was once a port, the plain I drove across to reach the vineyards the silted-up remnants. In Pella’s main museum, a mosaic of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, serves as a reminder that grapes have thrived here for millennia. In most religions, the transformation of grape juice into wine is viewed as a miracle, and therefore as a fitting accessory for worship. The panthers or tigers on those mosaics symbolise wine’s wilder and more fearsome side: the potential for intoxication. Later, walking into Thessaloniki’s ancient Church of St Dimitrios, with its glowing icons and bearded priests, I was reminded that the ancient polytheists may have disagreed on many things, but the importance of wine is not one of them.
On my second trip out to Naoussa I stopped off in Veria. Here I ate a superb array of local dishes — succulent ksestimeno, a local version of veal meatballs; proper dolmades — at 12 Grada, a tiny restaurant owned by three brothers. “Don’t you fight?” I asked. “All the time!” came the reply (mains from £8.40; fb.com/12grada).
My next stop was the tomb of Phillip II of Macedon, who was assassinated at a wedding and buried by his son, Alexander the Great. While all the surrounding tombs were pillaged long ago, by some marvellous chance, Phillip’s survived to be rediscovered in the 1970s. It was extraordinary to enter the dark museum, where intricate golden crowns and other excavated paraphernalia glow, and see a structure built to honour a man who died in 336BC. Ancient history and modern gastronomy is my kind of pairing, but back in the city there were more conventional matches. “In Thessaloniki, when we say good restaurants we mean good fish restaurants,” said Gaitanou, and she took me to Maiami on the waterfront, to eat the freshest possible fish — this city has one of the country’s largest fishing ports — paired with a delicate rosé, a blend of xinomavro, limnonia and another local grape, mavroudi. Apparently, when the Russian president Vladimir Putin came to the city he was supposed to eat here but the American-sounding name — it’s pronounced Miami — put him off. His loss: the fish is superb (mains from £14; maiamirestaurant.gr).
I ate too well, in too many places, to list them all here, although Blé Vin, a very modern wine bar with a terrific local list, deserves a special mention (mains from £24.50; blevin.gr), as does Canteen, with its superb steak, right near the 15th-century White Tower that stands as a reminder of 500 years of Ottoman occupation (mains from £10.50; Dim. Gounari 7). There was high-end food at Mavri Thalassa on the waterfront (mains from £48; mavri-thalassa.gr). And bougatsa, a delicious filo parcel that can enfold spinach or “anything you like, really,” as Philippos Bantis, the third-generation owner of tiny café Bougatsa Bantis, told me (bougatsa from £2.65; bougatsa-bantis.business.site).
I was given a sneak preview of the shiny modern Modiano Market, which has recently been rescued from disrepair, and wandered around the traditional old Kapani market nearby. I loved this comfortable cohabitation of ancient and new. I walked out of the stunningly beautiful 8th-century Hagia Sofia, one of the city’s oldest churches, and I drove across an ancient sea to taste wines that were known when Aristotle was young, and which are now putting Greece on the modern winemaking map.
Nina Caplan was a guest of Thessaloniki City Tourism (thessalonikitourism.gr) and Visit Greece (visitgreece.gr). For more information on the Macedonia wine routes see northern-greece.com. Stay at the Onoma Hotel in Thessaloniki (B&B doubles from £94; onomahotel.com) or the Palea Poli Hotel in Naoussa (B&B doubles from £92; paleapoli.gr). Fly to Thessaloniki
Three more surprising wine regions
1. Georgia
Georgia has been making wines since the Stone Age, using a method that consists of fermenting the juice, skins, stalks and pips of pressed grapes in quevri, earthenware vessels buried in the ground. The place to taste the country’s amber or skin-contact wines is in the Kakheti region, to the east of Tbilisi. This small-group tour includes a visit to the 6th-century Alaverdi monastery.
Details Five nights’ B&B from £849pp, including tastings (responsibletravel.com). Fly to Tbilisi
2. Essex, UK
It’s not just wines from England’s southernmost counties that make headlines: at the Decanter World Wine Awards last June, London’s Vagabond Urban Winery won a medal for a 2020 chardonnay made with grapes grown at the Clayhill vineyard in Essex’s Crouch Valley (winecellardoor.co.uk). The New Hall Wine Estate pioneered wine-growing here in 1969, and if you visit on an open day, you can join a barrel-top tasting (free; April 28, June 23 and 24 and August 19; newhallwines.com). Le Bouchon boutique hotel in Maldon is handy for both.
Details Half-board doubles from £170 (lebouchon.co.uk)
3. Hungary
There’s more to Hungarian wines than the ultra-sweet tokaji aszu. Today’s producers are experimenting with dry tokaji fermint wines, and you can try both at the opulent castle and vineyard hotel Grof Degenfeld. En route, taste bikaver (bull’s blood) wine in the city of Eger. South of Budapest, try reds in the warmer regions of Szekszard and Villany.
Details B&B doubles from £97 (grofdegenfeld.com)
Lisa Johnson
Source : The Times