Vothonas
Cave-carved wine cellar tunneling three hundred meters underground, still poured by its founding family.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Vothonas in Santorini follows Grigorios Koutsogiannopoulos, who began digging a wine cellar into the island's volcanic rock in 1870 and kept boring sideways until visitors could lose their bearings inside. Four generations of his family have kept pouring wine from that same tunnel, and the guide traces what they were really after in this ash-dry soil: protection for a vine that a louse called phylloxera could never reach. Some of the vines growing outside are said to be over a century old, trained low and coiled into baskets against the wind rather than up a trellis.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Santorini Wine Museum
Three-hundred-meter cave museum eight meters underground, tracing a family's winemaking trade since eighteen seventy.
Hatzidakis Winery
Underground cave cellar aging wine from ungrafted, centuries-old volcanic vines.
Gavalas Winery
Stone canava-winery with a lantern-lit cellar tunnel, still crushing grapes by five-generation family hands.
Art Space Art Gallery - Winery - Museum
Nineteenth-century pumice wine cave, once a tomato cellar, now aging vin santo beside contemporary art.
"Emmanuel A. Lignos" Santorini Folklore Museum
Cave dwelling and wine cellar hand-carved from volcanic rock, restored with period tools and workshops.
Finikia
Farming village of cave-carved wine cellars once tied to the fortunes of Oia's sea captains.