Romeiko

Romeiko is the native red of western Crete, grown mainly around Kissamos in the Chania region, and it is a grape defined by what look like flaws. It is pale and unstable in colour, high in alcohol and acidity, low in tannin and highly prone to oxidation. For much of the twentieth century that reputation, and a lot of oxidised home wine, held Cretan wine back. In the right hands, those same traits have become the basis for some of Crete's most original wines.

The Marouvas grape

Romeiko's signature is Marouvas, a traditional oxidative wine of the Kissamos area whose name means aged in the Cretan dialect. It is made by keeping the wine in large old barrels that are topped up with new wine each year, a solera-like system that parallels Sherry and Madeira, so that oxidation becomes a deliberate style rather than a fault. The result is high in alcohol, nutty and softly acidic, with a character that recalls oloroso sherry or Madeira. Tradition, more folklore than fact but consistently told, has families burying a barrel at a child's birth to open it years later at a wedding, the name made literal. The grape's own name comes from Romios, the Byzantine and Ottoman-era word for a Greek. It should not be confused with the similarly named Mavromaiko, which DNA has confirmed is an unrelated variety.

A grape reinvented

Modern producers have turned Romeiko's difficulty into a feature. Manousakis spent around twelve years developing a Blanc de Noirs, a white wine made from the red grape, turning its pale, oxidation-prone juice into an asset. Others make sun-dried sweet versions and fresher, lighter dry reds and rosés, and the grape is also distilled into tsikoudia, the Cretan pomace spirit. Names to look for include Manousakis, Karavitakis and Dourakis.