The Hinterlands
Driving down the eastern side of the Peloponnese, it gradually becomes clear why Laconia is not high on people's list of Greek wine regions to visit. Nemea, agiorgitiko's lush, green stronghold, is just a little over an hour south of Athens; another hour will place you smack in the middle of Mantinia's high plateau, where moschofilero rules.

To get to Laconia, you need time and fortitude. Heading south, the road rises and takes stomach–turning twists for a while before panning out into a valley. Then, to the west, the Taygetus Mountains loom, their sheer, 8,000–foot slopes holding dark clouds in their snow–capped peaks. To the east, Mount Parnon's jagged, slate–gray screes are topped in snow as well at 6,433 feet. It feels like passing through Scylla and Charybdis, with automotive part dealers and mountain goats instead of sirens.

Eventually, the valley spills out of the mountains, the road loosely following the Evrotas River down toward the Laconic Bay. Near the river, the land is the deep, glossy green of orange trees; higher up, the hills are dressed in the drab silver–gray of scrub and olive trees. Veering southeast, into the easternmost leg of the three–pronged southern Peloponnese peninsula, the chill of the mountainscape dissolves into Mediterranean warmth, goats my main company.

The vines
It's not until I hit Veliás, smack in the middle of the leg, that I see a vineyard. It belongs to George Tsibidis, who packs me into his beat–up Jeep for a tour of his vines. Along the way, we pass a little white house, his mother's, the house where he grew up. "When I was a kid, up until 1965, all of this was vines," he says, gesturing at the silvery landscape, all olive trees. "It was the center of the wine industry: from here to Sparta, up to the foot of Mount Parnon. But with subsidies for olives, everyone pulled the vines out."

He'd planted olives, too: Kalamata, the next leg over, may have its cured olives, but Laconians are justly proud of their tiny Athenolias, an oil olive that has supported them for centuries. Tsibidis's trees now stood in a row of plastic pots. When he was growing up, the local wine was bulk wine, he says. "Monemvasia was only history, and I figured I can't make wine with history; I'd have to get down to the earth." So he pulled out his olive trees to plant vines. As we turn onto a massively rutted dirt path, he points to the remains of an ancient stone press, one of three he's found.

Byron Veras joins us at the vineyard; he's a former mining engineer and an amateur historian who helps out at the winery. "The port of Monemvasia was the trading post for the hinterlands; it was in contact with North Africa, east and west from Alexandria, and up to Venice—the whole of the Mediterranean," he explains. "It was known for olive oil and wine, but by the time of the second Turkish occupation, wine here had dwindled away. A lot of old varieties just disappeared—like a grape called monemvasia, for instance." The wine that came from this area was also called Monemvasia, or Malvasia by the Venetians, who controlled the area twice in its heyday.

Tsibidis decided to figure out what was left and what he could resurrect. "I was going around collecting grapes from locals, looking through their vineyards," Tsibidis says. Some were easier than others to identify: "In a field of a lot of sheep, goats stand up higher: that's asproudi," he says. "But it had almost disappeared because it matures much earlier than the rest—around the fifteenth of August. The birds love it."

He points out a parcel of monemvasia, planted with vine stock he brought in from Paros, an island not far from Santorini. He also has plots of assyrtiko and kidonitsa, varieties he believes may have been part of the original "Malvasia" mix. "My goal from the start was to find the correct varieties to make true Malvasia—both the best quality and historically correct." He's applying for an OPE—Greece's equivalent of an Appellation of Controlled Origin—for "Monemvasia-Malvasia," a sweet wine fashioned after the ancient one.

Saving grapes
Heading southwest, clear across the peninsula toward Pandanassa, I look for vineyards, but the hills read mostly in vivid flashes of yellow broom and red iron–laced stones, reminders of the area's volcanic and seismic past. I half expect to feel a tremor; Veras told me the region feels quakes about 200 times a year. "But only a two or three on the Richter scale," he'd said. The tiny town is only about 35 kilometers away, but it's nearly an hour before I come around a rise and see Yiannis Vatistas waiting for me outside his SUV. Behind him is his vineyard, an expanse of young vines sloping down toward the bay, the water an even deeper blue on this side of the leg.

"My oldest vineyards are thirty kilometers south," he says, near Agios Nickolaos, at the tip of the peninsula. "But this was the only place I could get a large parcel, where I could put together something that was like a single estate." He points out the petroulianos, then malagousia, a vine from the mainland; sauvignon blanc, chardonnay, assyrtiko and athiri also fill the rows here. If Tsibidis is devoted to discovering a wine he can call MonemvasiaÐ Malvasia, Vatistas is a tinkerer, exploring a contemporary identity for Laconian wine. "I started with roditis, agiorgitiko and thrapsa," he says, naming three common Peloponnese varieties, "and it made good wine—my first wine was in 1996." That was Laconia's first commercial wine of the 20th century; he moved on to a short flirtation with chardonnay before deciding that local varieties were the way to go. But he had the same problem as Tsibidis: What were the local varieties?

The turning point came in 1999, he says, when he and Tsibidis embarked on a project led by Dr. Haroula Spinthiropoulou, Greece's preeminent viticulturalist; they worked with Vitro Hellas (a viticultural research station), the Agricultural University of Athens and NAGREF (a national research institution). Tsibidis and Vatistas collected samples and sent them to Vitro; by the time the project ended in 2001, they'd positively identified sixteen varieties and were granted permission to plant them.

With this, the talk turns to wind, as it often does in the Mediterranean—how the Voréas, if it blows in the spring, rips the sprouts from the vines; how in the summertime the Nótios brings a cool breeze from the sea at about 5 p.m. Only this particular wind—nameless, apparently—is chilling us to the bone. We decide to head to Monemvasia to get a look around before dark, and continue our talk over some wines.

Monemvasia, the place
I'd read that Monemvasia was a rock rising 656 feet out of the ocean, but that meant little until it appeared. The rock looks like it had been punched out of the seabed into the air, its sheer walls rising straight out of the ocean on all but one side—where the old city was chiseled out during the 6th century.

To get onto the rock we drive across a small bridge; to get into the city we must get out and walk through an ancient, heavy wood door firmly recessed in the city's fortifications. It's the only way in—Monemvasia, in fact, means "one entrance." Old men stand around with wheelbarrows and mules: Anything that can't walk in must be transported this way, including every board and bag of mortar that's being used to restore the buildings.

"In 1969, when I first started to come here, there was nothing else but this church," says Veras, who's joined me for a walk. The church is a small, low–slung building on one side of the little town square. "This was a thriving community with a school and trade until the end of the 1940s, after the civil war; then everyone emigrated, and it fell into disrepair." It wasn't until the late 1960s that there was any interest in rehabilitating it, and from the beginning any work was strictly controlled by the local architectural society.

Now, the town is perfectly manicured and a jumble of architectural styles: Venetian churches blend into Muslim mosques and Frankish temples, testaments to a series of occupations over the centuries. This was one of the richest centers of the Byzantine Empire—the rivers supported silk mills and the land furnished some 16 million liters of wine a year by the end of the 15th century, most all of that to ship elsewhere.

We wind our way through cobblestoned alleys to a fish taverna where the winemakers are waiting. Vatistas pours a glass of petroulianos to start, the 2009. It's his ninth vintage but it's clear he's not satisfied. "It's a strange variety," he says. "It ripens unevenly and some years we get a second budding that bears fruit. We have to pick twice then; there's a ten–day difference. And there are two clones, one with small grapes, the other bigger. It's not productive—it gives maybe six tons a hectare, and has very thin skin, so it's susceptible to oidium." Tasting it, it becomes clear why he bothers working with the challenging grape: It tastes of Laconia, all stones and orange trees, sunny yet lean.

Then he pours a kidonitsa, a vine he isolated from the local field blends. "I liked its quince scent," he says, "and planted 800 heads." It has the fragrance of quince and the richness of quince paste; its minerality brings back flashes of the red–tinged rocks that line the roads leading here.

Tsibidis pours an orange blossom–scented asproudi and a monemvasia filled with green fig flavor, but it's his Monemvasia Monemvasios that stands out. A blend of kidonitsa, monemvasia, asproudi and assyrtiko, it's so savory it's almost porky, with a salinity and lemon acidity that make it feel rich and crisp at once. At that moment, a grilled fish lands on the table and an argument breaks out: Some say it's grouper (sfrida) while others insist it's snapper (sinagrida). Whatever it is, it is meaty and delicious, all the more so with this savory, saline wine.

To settle the argument, someone asks Vatistas, who's been silent up to this point. "Sfrida," he says matter–of–factly, and returns to eating. It turns out he was a fisherman from age seven, a job he eventually parlayed into a fish distribution business and then a restaurant in Athens. So how did he get into wine, I ask. "When I was 43, I had heart bypass surgery. After five years, I went for another. My surgeon said I'd better start an open–air life, so I bought some land and began to plant trees. And after some olives, why not vines, too?"

Then comes saiti, a pancake–like pie of herbs and grated goat cheese, a local specialty. It's a chance to pour a red, and Vatistas chooses a thrapsa. "It's a very old local variety, spread all over," he says. "A big grape, big clusters, but with thin skins—this and petroulianos are the two varieties most susceptible to disease." Those thin–skinned grapes give a pale red redolent of roses, cherries and their almond–toned pits; it has the weight of silk and feels vibrantly fresh even as the flavors deepen to mocha, cinnamon and clove. Perhaps this is how great wine tasted six centuries ago, in the heyday of the Byzantine Empire. It certainly tastes like something that could come only from here.

To finish, Vatistas pours a sweet wine, a blend of nearly equal parts assyrtiko, petroulianos and malvasia. He dried the grapes for a week before pressing, fermenting and then aging the wine in 225–liter barrels, topped up over the course of its six years (so far) in wood. It recalls salted milk caramels in both its soft texture and flavor, the brown sugar notes mellow and slightly saline. The fruit appears in shades of citrus; no one grape variety stands out. He calls it Malvasia, though he makes no claim to its historical accuracy: It's just one—his first—imagining of that famous wine.

Tsibidis and Veras have taken a different approach to recreating the ancient Malvasia. They studied the local varieties with help from government researchers and came up with four—monemvasia, kidonitsa, asproudi and assyrtiko—that reflected their understanding of the historic wine. After some trials, the government advisors suggested that the blend should be at least half monemvasia. Tsibidis shows me four vintages of his version, an experiment he started in 2001. He follows the same general method as Vatistas, only his blend is three–quarters monemvasia and one–quarter kidonitsa. The wines are surprisingly high in acidity, their brown sugar sweetness curbed by gingery spice and a trace of walnut–skin bitterness. And they seem to get fresher with age, as the sweetness lifts and the details come to the fore. He tells me they hope an OPE MonemvasiaÐMalvasia will be approved by 2011. To me, regardless the deliciousness of the wines, this seems hard to imagine, given there are only two significant producers so far, and their interpertations are quite different.

Yet after dinner, I spend some time wandering in the perfectly preserved city, rebuilt from the ground up in 40 years, hanging impossibly on the side of a rock thrust out of the sea. And slowly the fast track for a Monemvasia-Malvasia appellation no longer seems so crazy. From the old city wall, looking across a vast expanse of moonlit water toward Istanbul, the challenge is clear: to restore the land that built this incredible city, and in the process, perhaps, imbue it with some of its former glory. It will never be the same—the city or the wine—but that's not the point. The jumble of influences lends Monemvasia a unique richness, just as the jumble of grapes in Laconia's vineyards is revealing a region possibly richer than any other in Greece.

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