RETSINA HISTORY

Retsina has a tradition that goes back 3500 years, and like many other things we enjoy today, it is a product that was discovered by chance. In ancient Greece, when wine was vinified and stored in large clay pots known as amphorae, the oxygen easily passed through the porous surface, thus resulting in oxidation. In order to protect the wine, one solution was to cover the mouth and inside of the pot with resin from the pine trees neighbouring on the vineyards.

However, the contact between the resin and the fermenting must, added some of the pine's freshness to the wine, thus creating a character that soon became very popular. So a new category of wines was born, resinous wines, which—beyond the borders of Greece—were also found in many other areas in the Mediterranean during antiquity. In the Po Valley in northern Italy, or on the shores of southern France, there are accounts of the production of resinous wine, which was often more expensive, as it was considered to be a more select wine than the others.

There are also many references to this unique category of wines. In his treatise On Odours, Theophrastus expresses his 'weakness' for retsina, stating how compatible this union of two agricultural products, resin and grapes, is. He then goes on to underline that the best resin comes from the Pinus Halepensis (the Aleppo Pine), while Pliny provides a detailed description of the manner in which resinous wine is produced.

However, as time passed, the production of retsina became limited to Central Greece, where it continued—until modern times—to be the main type of wine in the region around Attica. From there, retsina spread once again to Macedonia and the Aegean islands. The bottling of retsina for the first time in the 1950s gave a new boost to its production, while the subsequent growth in tourism in the Athens region in the following decade made retsina known throughout the world.During the same period,

British historian Rex Warner wrote in his book titled Views of Attica and its surroundings that “the resin which gives its name and its peculiar taste to the wine seems to me not only a preservative, but to infuse something of the sharpness and brilliance of the bright air around the mountain pine woods”. Outside Greece, retsina has already become synonymous to Greek wine.

It was during this period that the first efforts were made to protect this traditional Greek product. Initially through transnational agreements and subsequently in the framework of the European Community, but mainly due to the great efforts by the 'iron lady' of Greek wine, Stavroula Kourakou-Dragona, retsina was recognised as a unique Greek product and was protected as a Traditional Appellation wine.

Unfortunately, retsina had already lost its radiance. Bad vinification practices in which resin was used to cover defects in low-quality wines caused the entire category of this traditional wine to gain a bad reputation.

The production of retsina dropped continuously, while consumption was directed towards the "new" wines from international varieties and from the small estates and wineries that started to appear after the 1970s.

People started to turn their backs on our traditional wine, while most producers tried to rid themselves of the "stigma" of retsina. Few stayed true to retsina, and even fewer believed in the qualitative revival of retsina, which did not take long to come.