Santo Wines

This guide to Santo Wines above Santorini's caldera starts with a strange sight: vines woven flat into coiled baskets called kouloura instead of climbing a trellis. You'll hear how growers here have long contended with the meltemi wind and a nearly rainless climate, and how a quirk of the volcanic soil may have spared some vines a plague that devastated Europe's vineyards after 1870. It traces the cooperative back to its founding in 1947, and asks what has let some of these vines keep growing on their own original roots for centuries.