Commandaria is the world's oldest named wine still in production. Hesiod described the method around 700 BC — grapes sun-dried on mats to concentrate their sugar — for the Cypriot wine then called nama. The name came later, from the Grande Commanderie of the Knights of St John at Kolossi, whose estates traded the wine across medieval Europe.
Richard the Lionheart, marrying at Limassol in 1191, is said to have called it "the wine of kings and the king of wines" — the attribution is legend, the reputation was real. Made today from Xynisteri and Mavro dried in the September sun of the Troodos foothills, it remains amber-dark, raisined, honeyed and low-key immortal: antiquity's dessert, never discontinued.