On donkeys, books and pandemics

Posted on May 6, 2021 by Marjory

IT’S been a while since I’ve written a blog piece. Like many of you, I suspect, the last 12 months has felt like being thrown a curved ball – or more of a demolition ball really. The pandemic experience has been troubling and strange, and downright frightening at times, locked in our domestic prisons, experiencing strictures none of us have ever come across before. I have heard my family talk about living through wartime Britain, and although the pandemic is not quite that bad, I could understand for the first time how terrifying and restricted their lives must have been.

Despite having plenty of time to write regular pieces, such as blog posts, I failed at the beginning of the lockdown last March to gather up the motivation when other issues seemed much more important. And the future looked uncertain.

I’m sure the past year has tested everyone’s resolve, our faith in government, in religion, our small place in this terrifying world. If anything good can possibly come of this pandemic, it must surely be to appreciate the simple, true things of life more. If we once complained about our lot: not having the perfect life; enough money; a big enough house; or any of the dozens of things we obsess over in the western world, perhaps we won’t – any more.

Beautiful Kynance Cove in Cornwall, on the far edge of care

Now we know how happy and well-off we really were, all this time, and just didn’t know it. Many of us have gone back to basics, spending more time being quiet, watching instead of talking, thinking instead of acting, appreciating nature, cherishing health and love above other things. I don’t know about you, but I have found how easy it is to live with less, as long as you have health and love. I’m sure we’ve all realised this now. And I do hope you have all survived the pandemic without too much loss or sadness.

For my part, I know that what made the past year easier to bear was the fact I now live in Cornwall, near the sea, a beautiful part of the world and a place where you can really feel the power of nature. With its wonderful coves and big skies, it has felt like the best possible place to be in lockdown.

And I have not been completely idle these past 12 months. After a bumpy start, I did start another book last summer and once it picked up speed, I found it was a superb way to shut out the world and its cares a while. That’s the beauty of writing. It’s your own world for as long as you’re doing it. Yours, and no-one else need see your efforts, or interfere, or take it away from you for that period of time. It’s between you and the page or computer screen. And that’s magical, to have some control after all, to have a refuge. There is nothing else like quite like it!

Foteini with her donkey Riko and a copy of Things Can Only Get Feta

Wallace looking cool in Greece

So, finally the book has just been published, on May 5. A Donkey On The Catwalk: Tales of life in Greece, is the 4^th in the Peloponnese series. For those of you who have read my Greek memoirs, starting with the Amazon bestseller Things Can Only Get Feta, this book will seem a little different because it’s separate tales and travel narratives rather than one long narrative. However, the theme is still Greece and most of the tales are set in the wild Mani region of the Peloponnese again, with a return of some of the characters you have loved, like Foteini the inimitable goat farmer with her eccentric take on life. And Wallace, our Jack Russell companion, is still creating mayhem. How could he not? For those of you, however, who haven’t read my memoirs, you can read this one as a standalone, as with all the memoirs really.

As well as tales from the Peloponnese, there are stories from other Greek locations my husband Jim and I have visited, including Pelion and the islands of Santorini and Corfu. This book also offers tales from some of my own earlier trips to Greece, which I have not published before, including a year in Athens during a dangerous time of political upheaval, and a sabbatical in Crete, with a touch of romance in an idyllic setting.

To counteract the times in which I was writing this book, I’ve blended a lot of humour and lightness into these stories because, as psychotherapist Sigmund Freud once said, “Humour is a mature response to human suffering”, or words to that effect. Or rather, there’s nothing like having a laugh when life’s going pear-shaped.

Marjory outside the Ayia Playia taverna in Falanthi, near Koroni

There’s more fun and craziness with Foteini and a strange shoe creation; a comical interface with a religious relic in Corfu, a house minding stint in southern Greece above a taverna with escapades we didn’t expect. But there are other stories too that are thought-provoking and chip away a bit more at the Greek psyche and lifestyle.

I hope you enjoy this book and if you do, please let me know. I always love to hear from readers. And do post a review of the book on Amazon if you care to. It always helps to introduce an author’s work to new readers.

Thanks for dropping by. Stay safe. x

The Greek books

To buy the new ebook (paperback to follow soon) on all Amazon stores, click on this universal link: https://mybook.to/DonkeyOnCatwalk

Marjory’s other best-selling memoirs deal with her time in Greece with her husband Jim and Wallace the terrier, living in the wild southern Peloponnese. She has also written two novels set in southern Greece. You can find them on her Amazon page.

Or visit the Books page on her website www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com/greek-books

You can also follow her on FB www.facebook.com/marjory.mcginn

And Twitter: www.twitter.com/@fatgreekodyssey

Thanks for dropping by. All comments are gratefully received. Just click on the ‘chat’ bubble at the top of this page.

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Why we must keep the spirit of old Greece afloat . . .

Posted on August 23, 2015 by Marjory

Marjory being rowed about Elounda harbour by a kindly local during a long sabbatical in Crete, 1989

AS someone who has been going to Greece all my life, since the 1970s, the political events of the past few months have saddened me. I am wondering, along with everyone else, how Greece’s economic situation and its politics ever got so convoluted.

In recent months the scenario has included punishing negotiations for a new bailout; a referendum called by PM Alexis Tsipras, who then ignored the results, as well as the 65 per cent of Greeks opposing austerity; a new and terrifying agreement signed with the Troika; a mutiny by some Syriza MPs; Tsipras’s resignation; a September election tipped; a new breakaway leftist party. There have been frenetic political twists and turns, like a manic rollercoaster with brake failure. Most Greeks claim to be confused now.

As one of my Twitter followers, a Greek teacher, recently said: “I don’t know which way is up or down any more? Worse, I don’t know which way is right or left.”

Many others are devastated. A female friend in Athens, with a young son, wrote to me recently, saying: “We feel that we are on a boat that’s sinking. We don’t know what comes next and we are trying to live from day to day.”

She also believes, as someone who works as an economist in the city, that the country will change drastically in the coming years after the next bout of austerity and the fire sale of assets.

I too have had a feeling of dread for months that we are witnessing the last carefree days of the Greece that we all used to know and love. I hope my Athens friend is wrong, but in my heart I fear she is right. Change is coming!

No head for heights: The statue at the Ancient Agora in Athens

A headless statue in the Agora, Athens seems to say more about the troubled present day city that it does about the past

I have been in love with Greece all my life, from the early 1970s on my first trip, not long after high school in Australia, when I arrived in Athens for a short break and ended up staying for a year’s working holiday. Despite the fact Greece was then ruled by a military dictatorship, and it was yet another tragic time in its history, in other ways it was, culturally and socially at least, a time of simplicity, even innocence, compared to now.

All the elements of Greek life and culture that philhellenes still love were there in abundance. I wrote about this time in Athens as a parallel narrative in my book Homer’s Where The Heart Is. When I first arrived in the city and stepped off the overland bus from London it was love at first sight: “It was nothing I could easily define, but more a fusion of disparate things, all maddeningly exotic to my young mind: the incomprehensible street signs, the old people dressed in black, the coffee shops, the bakeries wafting aromas of freshly baked bread and tiropites, and all the other smells even the bad ones – fetid drains and a city still staggering after a long summer heatwave. It all blended into a heady Levantine cocktail.”

I have had many trips to Greece since, some for just a few weeks’ vacation, but many were quite long, from a few months to my recent four-year odyssey in southern Greece.

Jim and Marjory with their friend Artemios on a trip to Santorini in 2002

When I remember the earlier trips, I feel so much nostalgia for that old Greece, whether it was in Athens or places of unique beauty like Santorini, or small unspoilt islands like Serifos, Sifnos, Paxos, Patmos and for a way of life that was simple and charming, where donkeys were more common than cars and you could only buy your yoghurt in ceramic bowls, where there was only one kind of coffee, Nescafe, and where the drachma still reigned. Joining the Eurozone was a futuristic folly. Despite not having much money, most people seemed happier, and were fantastically hospitable.

In 1989, I took a sabbatical from my newspaper job in Sydney and went to Crete for two months. It was totally unplanned, no itinerary, no rooms booked in advance. I took a boat from Piraeus to Irakleion and travelled to the Venetian town of Hania. I hadn’t planned getting sick either, but a stomach bug left me stranded in a harbourside hotel for days, where a doctor had to be summoned.

caption for elounda pic by www.dilos.com

The harbour at Elounda in Crete, some years after Marjory’s first trip. Picture courtesy of www.dilos.com

Later on, a chance recommendation from a fellow Aussie made me seek out a convalescence of sorts in Elounda, a small undeveloped fishing village then on the north-eastern coast of the island. Too weak to bother with buses, I got in a taxi and asked the driver to take me to Elounda. It didn’t seem strange to the driver that when we got there, I hadn’t anything booked. Don’t worry, he said kindly, we’ll find you something. It was October after all and not bursting with tourists, not back then anyway.

Near the harbour he stopped the car, but before he started scouting for rooms, a small rotund woman rushed out of her house, towards the taxi. Did I want a room, she asked me.

The taxi driver waited patiently while I followed her inside to see the small apartment (a bedroom, bathroom and tiny kitchen) on the ground floor. It was simple and clean. I took it on the spot, the taxi driver was dispatched, happy with his healthy fare and tip. That was the start of a wonderful stay in Elounda, and a friendship with the couple upstairs, Poppy and George, with whom I practically lived for the rest of my stay, watching their TV, sharing meals, helping Poppy to prepare some of them. I would often sit on her upstairs balcony with a few neighbouring women, chattering and cleaning mountains of horta (greens) just collected from the hills.

The couple also took me out on their small boat, the Peristeri, for local excursions. Once they took me fishing at 5am to the nearby island of Spinalonga, before Victoria Hislop had been inspired to set her book The Island there, about the former leper colony. When I went it was just a rather ruined and forlorn outpost.

The rest of the time in Elounda, I rambled the hills behind the village, often with Poppy, often alone, and everywhere I went people invited me in for drinks, coffee, meals, parea, company. When I finally left, Poppy and George hugged me and told me I must stay in touch as if I were a long-lost relative.

Greeks were like that then. And they still are in many parts of the country, especially in the islands and rural places like the southern Peloponnese, where we spent four years from 2010, living the first year in a remote hillside village in the Mani and later in Koroni, at the tip of the Messinian peninsula. In these areas we were shown the same warmth and familiarity by locals, as Poppy and George.

Some of the regulars in one of Koroni’s surviving old kafeneia in the main square

An old traditional shop in Koroni, a pantopoleio, on Karapavlou St, selling everything from wine to organic food and owned by the charming Tasos Sipsas

But Greece as a country has been slowly changing, of course. How could it not? It’s not a folk museum, after all. It has become more modern, European, apart from the plumbing, which remains antique! And inevitably, many of the old cultural elements are changing or disappearing. Fewer rural Greeks wear traditional clothing now. There are fewer kafeneia and ouzeries in villages than there used to be; there are fewer working villages. In the Mani we found that many wonderful hillside villages that were once full of life, shops and schools, were now inhabited by only a dozen or so locals. In many it was hard to find even one kafeneio or local store.

A folky and humorous sign for the local barbers, the Golden Scissors, in Koroni

With the drastic economic changes and cuts that are coming, will too much of Greece’s traditional life and customs change irrevocably, to squeeze Greece into a rule-bound northern Europe template? Trouncing all the features that, ironically, tourists go to Greece to experience?

I think that’s something that everyone with any ounce of love for Greece should fight against. We must save the spirit of old Greece, its personality, its old customs and crafts, and its ideals of friendship and hospitality because, as so many other countries have found, once you dismantle a country’s soul and the uniqueness of its past, you can never really get it back again. No-one who has travelled to Greece from the 1960s onwards could come to terms with that loss. Not least the inimitable Greeks themselves.

Homer’s Where The Heart Is

TO read more about living in Greece during the crisis in the southern Peloponnese, read my new travel memoir Homer’s Where The Heart Is. This is the sequel to the first, Things Can Only Get Feta (first published in 2013) about the start of our long odyssey in the rural Mani.

To those who have already read the latest book, thanks for your kind comments and Amazon reviews, which are always appreciated.

Both books are available on all Amazon’s international sites and also on the Book Depository www.bookdepository.com (with free overseas postage). If you are in Greece you can inquire about having the book ordered at your branch of the Public store www.public.gr

If any readers have queries about availability for both books, please contact me via the contact page on our website www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com where you will also find a ‘books’ page with other information about the books.

To buy either of my books please click on the Amazon links below:

Things Can Only Get Feta

Homer’s Where The Heart Is

You can also find me on Twitter @fatgreekodyssey

And Facebook www.facebook.com/ThingsCanOnlyGetFeta

www.facebook.com/HomersWhereTheHeartIs

Thanks for calling by.

© All rights reserved. All text and photographs copyright of the authors 2015. No content/text or photographs may be copied from the blog without the prior written permission of the authors. This applies to all posts on the blog.

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Why the EU must embrace the Zorba philosophy

Posted on July 18, 2015 by Marjory

Anthony Quinn as Zorba, with Alan Bates, dancing the sirtaki in the 1964 movie

THE events of the last few weeks, as Greece has fought for a new bailout deal, have left us all in shock. They have shown us how oppressive and vindictive the EU can be and, in contrast, how spirited and stoical the Greeks are when under attack and fighting for their lives.

I don’t want to add any more to the voluminous public discussions. Greater minds than mine have debated all the political/economic issues of the crisis. As someone who loves Greece, I can only pray there will be a good outcome for the country, despite more austerity piling up against it.

What I have gathered from watching recent events unfold – the June referendum and then EU leaders, particularly Germany, acting like schoolyard bullies – is this: most Europeans don’t really understand Greeks, or their culture. It’s as if few of them have ever been to Greece.

What EU leaders have tried to do is shoehorn the Greek character into a northern European template. It won’t go; it never will go. It’s ham-fisted and almost laughable. Greeks have a different story, a different history and cultural influences. Greece is still the least European country in Europe, still leaning gently towards its old Levantine influences, which makes it the exotic, appealing, often chaotic and, sometimes, maddeningly different place that it is. But we wouldn’t have it any other way.

A favourite old friend, Artemios, from Santorini typifies the Greek character: generous, maverick and an expert at skinning prickly pears

Wonderful, vibrant villagers from Megali Mantineia, where we lived in the Mani from 2010

Greeks will never be cool-headed, flinty, northern European clock-watchers, which is why generations of foreigners have flocked to Greece for respite. Apart from its physical beauty, Greece still has the human touch, which is something that has been lost in many parts of Europe, and the UK as well, to a degree.

Greeks have not been blameless in the way they have handled their economy, but I believe that it’s basically because they are different from their northern partners, their character has come in for a battering. They have been labelled as lazy, work-shy and corrupt, and these clichés have been echoed unfairly throughout much of the international media.

There is corruption, of course, as there is in every country, and there are complex reasons for it, but I believe that due to a weaker and not very independent media, the corruption and excesses of past governments have not been exposed as they might have been in western countries. Only now are we seeing more transparency in Greece, and the internet and social media has helped to expose wrongdoing where some of the press has not.

We forget that Greece has only recently emerged from a devastating series of occupations and political upheavals: 400 years of Turkish occupation; the punitive German occupation of the Second World War and the Greek civil war it spawned, and a disastrous military takeover in 1967 with a regime that lasted until 1974.

Four decades of relative calm since the 1970s is but a drop in the ocean for a country to re-invent itself. Until recent weeks, at least, the economic crisis was just another upheaval that Greeks have had to cope with.

During my time in Greece, I have found Greeks are among the hardest working people in Europe. In the last five years I met countless people, especially in the restaurant trade, who work more than 12 hours a day, seven days a week from May to October and in many areas like the Peloponnese will then do a long olive harvest in the winter.

Greeks are bred tough like Foteini, a ‘traditional woman’ from the Mani

Foteini, one of my farming friends in the Mani, who features prominently in both my books, is an unforgettable character and the toughest woman (a pensioner!) I’ve ever met anywhere. She harvests olives from her 200 trees, alone, every year, without fail, and rears a few goats to supplement her paltry farmer’s pension of 300 euros a month, which has been cut back since 2011. No pensioner in the UK would live like Foteini.

Not only have the Eurocrats tried to reinvent the Greek personality but they have also asked for the impossible, for a country to change its system overnight.

Andreas, one of our Greek friends in the Mani, who I wrote about in my second memoir Homer’s Where The Heart Is, put it this way during a discussion about the crisis in 2012, and I quote from the book (chapter 20): “The Troika moans at us… they say we don’t make changes fast enough in the government, and with taxes… but they want us to change centuries of customs and business in a few months. We cannot do it! Impossible!”

The recent events have proved him right. Impossible, and heartbreaking!

After a lifetime of visiting Greece and after four years living in the southern Peloponnese, most recently Koroni, in Messinia, I do not recognise many of the criticisms and cliches levelled at the Greeks. And nor do I feel they deserve the excruciating contempt and hatred that has been slung at them during the crisis.

Perhaps the main fault of ordinary Greeks (and not the dynastic elites or the shipping magnates) is not just making a mess of their fiscal spreadsheets, but in not putting money first in the way that other societies in the west do. In my opinion, this is a country that has put life to the fore, and people, with a belief in leventia (generosity of heart), parea (company), kefi (high spirits) filotimo (sense of honour).

I have found Greeks to be the kindest people I have ever met. When we lived in Koroni for a year, we befriended a couple who had a small holding (with a few goats and chickens) near to where we lived. Tasos and Eleni are warm-hearted and interesting people, whom we saw regularly and became fond of, along with their lovely family.

Gifts to strangers and hospitality, filoxenia, is alive and well in Greece

One day, after their long olive harvest, they arrived at our house with a big basket full of gifts from their farm: olive oil, olives, capers, goat cheese, herbs, and a bottle of their homemade wine (above). They simply wanted to show us hospitality, filoxenia, and make our stay more pleasant. We were overwhelmed by this gesture of friendship. It’s not the first time I’ve experienced this in Greece. Whether Greeks are in crisis or not, they never lose this generosity, or their indomitable spirit. The Zorba factor.

I believe it’s not Greeks who need to change radically, it’s the ‘other’ Europeans. They need to thaw and become more like the Greeks; get in touch with their inner Zorba. Perhaps then they’ll understand Greeks a bit better, offer a more reasonable fiscal blueprint for the future. And create a more compassionate EU.

As Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba the Greek, wrote: “A man needs a little madness in his life!”

The Eurocrats need to kick off their shoes, find a beach and dance on it. Opa!

Homer’s Where The Heart Is

TO read more about living in Greece during the crisis in the southern Peloponnese, read my new travel memoir Homer’s Where The Heart Is. This is the sequel to my first memoir, Things Can Only Get Feta (first published in 2013) about the start of our three-year adventure living in the rural Mani.

To those who have already read the latest book, thanks for your kind comments and Amazon reviews, which are always appreciated.

To buy either of my books please click on the Amazon links below:

Things Can Only Get Feta

Homer’s Where The Heart Is

You can also find me on Twitter @fatgreekodyssey

And Facebook www.facebook.com/ThingsCanOnlyGetFeta

www.facebook.com/HomersWhereTheHeartIs

Thanks for calling by.

© All rights reserved. Text and photographs copyright of the authors 2016. No content/text or photographs may be copied from the blog without the prior written permission of the authors. This applies to all posts on the blog.

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Greece and food – a seductive partnership

Posted on January 29, 2014 by Marjory

Tables for four with a view at Taki’s Taverna, Limeni Bay in the Mani.

WHAT happens when a few hungry friends get together on Twitter one afternoon and start talking about food – more particularly, Greek food? A global event is hatched! And that’ s pretty much what happened when the group, including a couple of Greek Americans, toyed with the idea of holding a huge Greek dinner Stateside.

One of the group, Keri Douglas, editor of a popular news and culture website based in Washington, took it up a notch and said: “Well, why not make it a global Greek event?” Why not indeed, and the event was launched.

She put the call out on her website and on social media for people to host a dinner at home, or in a favourite Greek restaurant. The idea was to connect Greeks and philhellenes everywhere on one evening (January 15) and help promote Greek produce, restaurants, recipes, food and wine businesses, as well as authors, bloggers and, well, everyone who wanted to join in. The condition was that everyone should Tweet and Facebook their event and share pictures.

The idea quickly went viral and by the time the dinner evening arrived there were four continents involved, 14 countries and 52 cities. And no-one was more surprised than Keri Douglas at how many people had jumped on board, giving their time, their cookery expertise, and even free produce. All for a good cause – Greece.

Yiouvetsi and moussaka at the restaurant we picked, Mediterranea, Stirling, Scotland.

Keri summed up the Greek Dinner on her website (www.9musesnews.com) saying: “Imagine a paradigm of connecting the culinary dimension of Greek culture with the intangible Greek heritage that influences people around the world!” Well, we couldn’t imagine it before, but we can now. And this amazing event looks set to become the first of many. Opa!

The Greek art of simplicity: fresh Mani figs, peaches and Feta cheese.

How food lies at the heart of Greekness

Greek holidays! What do you always remember, apart from the sun and sea, the laid-back lifestyle? Most people remember the fabulous meals they ate at sunny, beachside tavernas: Greek salad with feta, souvlaki, juicy stuffed peppers, fresh green olive oil, carafes of local wine. Food and Greece have always had a sensual partnership, but it’s more than just the joy of eating wholesome fresh produce in fabulous surroundings. The ritual of the long Greek meal is a social and cultural mainstay.

Through good times, and especially bad (and Greece has had its share of catastrophe), the Greek meal has been the thread that has united the community, family, the generations from the yiayia, who has passed down precious recipes, to the youngest children who will carry the traditions on. And it’s also about parea, company.

Villagers and priests from Megali Mantineia in the Mani celebrating a saint’s day and toasting their new village oven (behind).

To me the most enduring symbol of Greek life is the village yiorti (celebration), usually the feast day of a saint, where tables are set under the olive trees and you will see the local priest and village elders sitting beside goat farmers, olive harvesters, the rich, the poor, and all enjoying lively parea, good village food, and some local wine, of course.

In Greece, food shared together can be sumptuous or simple, like the vegetable dishes eaten by the more devout during Lent – a platter of horta (wild spring greens) collected from hillsides and fields, boiled and served with lemon juice and a drizzle of olive oil.

My own memories of holidays in Greece will always be bound up with the meals we shared with Greek friends.

Fish, salad, wine and good company, with Artemios on his Santorini balcony.

In 2003, Jim and I were visiting the island of Santorini and became friends with a farmer called Artemios who was 80 years old but energetic and spry for his age. He rode a donkey, kept goats, grew his own food in the rich volcanic soil around his small rural home, and also made his own wine.

The first time he invited us for lunch on the tiny balcony of his house, he made us fried fish, roasted eggplant and Greek salad, with a jug of his own wine. A simple meal, bursting with flavour. More than just the food, it was the length of time we sat eating, talking, sharing stories – despite my stuttering Greek. And also the time it took him later to sit and peel the spiky, fiddly fruit of the frangosika (prickly pear) for us to try for the first time.

I will always remember his words on that first occasion. It sums up the Greek philosophy of food and parea exactly.

“Now that we have shared a meal together at my house, we are friends forever,” he said.

And he meant it. On subsequent visits to Santorini we went to see him and shared other meals, sometimes at his house, sometimes in the nearby villages, and we remained great friends. It’s an ethos that Greeks all over the world share, which was reflected in last month’s event. Friendships forged on that January night will hopefully last a long time.

Artemios and Marjory sharing a Greek coffee on the island of Santorini.

I have enjoyed many, many fine meals in Greece with some wonderful people, but the meals Artemios gave us remain closest to my heart.

There have been entertaining meals as well in Greece that I remember for different reasons, like the meal Jim and I shared with a big-hearted family in the village of Megali Mantineia during our three-year stay in the Mani.

It was during a scorching, August lunch where we had to try tsikles, the little picked birds with the heads left on, so loved by the Maniots but not to everyone’s taste. Not to have tried one would have been an insult, and so we went through a kind of TV Bush Tucker Trial in front of all the other guests, with amusing results. The experience formed one of the chapters in my book Things Can Only Get Feta.

To share a meal with Greeks, or anyone for that matter, and then be friends forever. In this life, it doesn’t get much better than that!

For a full report on the Greek Dinner Around the World, visit Keri Douglas’s site www.9musesnews.com click here

If you share notes and pictures on Twitter about your Greek dinner, use the hashtag #GreekDinner to connect with international followers.

Books about Greece

To find out more about my two travel memoirs set in Greece Things Can Only Get Feta, and Homer’s Where the Heart Is, please visit the books page on the website www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com

To buy either of my books please click on the Amazon links below:

Things Can Only Get Feta

Homer’s Where The Heart Is

You can also find me on Twitter @fatgreekodyssey

And Facebook www.facebook.com/ThingsCanOnlyGetFeta

www.facebook.com/HomersWhereTheHeartIs

Thanks for calling by.

© All rights reserved. All text and photographs copyright of the authors 2016. No content/text or photographs may be copied from the blog without the prior written permission of the authors. This applies to all posts on the blog.

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Greek wine’s keener than retsina, Wallace the guitar hero …

Posted on June 10, 2012 by Marjory

The good and the grape: A vineyard in the Nemea region of the Peloponnese

Jim’s writing the blog this month, marvelling at Greek wine …

I’VE just sipped a glass of the Blood of Hercules – and it was superb. Don’t worry, I haven’t joined the Kalamata branch of Vampires Anonymous in Greece, I’m simply enjoying a robust red wine from the Peloponnese.

I’m not a wine buff, but I do know that Merlot isn’t a magician, and I’m amazed at the high quality of Greek wine, especially Peloponnesian varieties – from cheap barrelled wine served in tavernas to award-winning bottles produced on wine estates.

Greek wine has come a long way since I first visited the country in the 1970s. In those days it was all jugs of retsina, with enough resin in it to varnish a 12-seater dining table, and bottles of cheap plonk called Domesticos – or more appropriately known as Domestos by British tourists who compared it to the germ-killing household bleach.

Today, there’s a wide choice of wine produced from more than 300 indigenous grape varieties across Greece. Over the past decade, on holiday trips to several islands, I’ve tasted some excellent wines, such as Santorini’s nykteri variety of white wine and Kefalonia’s Robola, another fine white wine sold in bottles with a distinctive hessian covering.

Vine time: Grapes growing on a smallholding near Kalamata

However, I believe the wines of the Peloponnese are the cream of the crop – and excellent value for money. At grassroots level, some of the loveliest wine I’ve tasted has been produced by village taverna owners and their families and sold for as little as three or four euros a litre.

A lot of mass-produced wine in the Peloponnese is sold in 1.5-litre plastic bottles, and much of it is “extremely quaffable” as one British expat and wine expert likes to tell everybody.

A summer favourite is chilled rose wine – a type I’d never touch with a barge pole in the UK and typified by the sweet Mateus Rose from Portugal. The Peloponnese rose is more red than rose coloured and far less sweet than the Portuguese stuff.

Some of the finest rose wine comes from the Monemvasia area of Laconia. Unlike the rest of Greece, most wines consumed in this region of the Peloponnese is rose, with red and white a long way behind. The Laconian vineyards are planted with varieties of grape intermixed in the correct ratio of white and red to achieve the bright colour and bouquet of rose.

Lovely trio: Two reds from the Nemea region flank the malagousia white wine

In Kalamata, there are two large-scale wineries producing some terrific wines – Inomessiniaki and Bio Vin, which are both near Kalamata Airport – visit their websites www.inomessiniaki.gr and www.biovin.gr Bio Vin wines are made by Ioannis Tsavolakis and come from strictly selected grapes, products of organic viticulture.

The best-known wine-producing area of the Peloponnese is Nemea, south-west of Corinth, turning out dry red wine cultivated from the local agioritiko grapes. One of the finest Greek varieties is called “Blood of Hercules” due to its deep red colour. You can pick up a bottle of decent Nemea red for as little as 3.20 euros in supermarkets in the Peloponnese. Visit the region’s website www.nemeawines.gr

However, try to find these lovely Greek wines in supermarkets in Britain and you’re wasting your time. The only Greek wine I’ve seen on the shelves in Tesco or Morrison is rough-and-ready retsina. As the editor of one wine magazine in Britain told me: “Greek wine is a small, niche market in the UK with little interest”.

Surely Greece, with its economy in meltdown, could seize the chance to boost its beleaguered exports revenue by promoting its superb wines in Britain. It could follow the example of Australian wineries, which came to dominate the British wine market by aggressive marketing – some Aussie wines were on sale in UK supermarkets at lower prices than in Australia. Along with tourism, Greek wines could help get the country back on its feet.

Big bouquet: Moschofilero white wine from the Mantinia region

Another great wine-producing region of the Peloponnese is Mantinia, north of Tripoli, which makes lovely white wine from the moschofilero grapes cultivated on the slopes of Mount Mainalo. One of the best moschofilero wines is produced by Ino wines (www.inowines.gr).

A favourite tipple is the malagousia white wine, sold for 3.99 euros at Lidl. This rare Greek variety comes from outside the Peloponnese and is cultivated on the slopes of Mount Kitheron, north of Athens. It easily rivals those tasty sauvignon blancs from New Zealand’s Marlborough region – bursting with a bouquet of exotic fruits …

Good God, now I’m starting to sound like a wine connoisseur. Someone pass me a tin jug of warm retsina and a dirty glass …

Paw player: Wallace gets to grips with the guitar

You aint nothin’ but a hound dog…

WALLACE our Jack Russell dog has amazed us with his enthusiasm for new hobbies: he’s already mastered high jumping, sprint running, surfing, motorbike riding. Now he’s gone for singing and playing guitar. Great stuff, but why can’t he sharpen up some other abilities as well, like picking the winning numbers for the Euro Millions lottery?

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Big fat Greek blog

Life in the southern Peloponnese with two journalists and a crazy dog

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