Cyprus has made wine for perhaps five and a half millennia, and Xynisteri is the white thread through that history. In the Troodos foothills, where many vineyards sit above the altitudes phylloxera reached, a share of its vines still stand ungrafted on their own roots — a rarity mainland Europe lost in the nineteenth century.
The grape leads a double life. Sun-dried on mats and blended with the dark Mavro, it becomes commandaria, the amber sweet wine the crusaders knew and legend crowns "wine of kings and king of wines" — among the oldest named wines still in production. Picked fresh from the high vineyards, it is the opposite creature: a light, citrus-herbal island white, drunk young in the heat it was made for.