The retsina grape. Savatiano is Attica's drought-immune workhorse, and the base of the pine-resined wine Greeks have drunk since amphorae were sealed with resin some two and a half thousand years ago — the seal flavoured the wine, and the flavour outlived the technology that caused it.
For most of the twentieth century that association condemned it: Savatiano meant the taverna carafe, cheap and anonymous. The reassessment began in its own vineyards. The Attic plain holds old, ungrafted, dry-farmed bush vines in quantity, and handled seriously — low yields, careful pressing, ageing on the lees — they give textured, honeyed, unresinated whites that surprise everyone, alongside retsinas finally made with a care the old seal never received.