Aphrodite, Women, and Wine
She is . . . the moon and . . . men sacrifice to her in women’s dress,
women in men’s, because she is held to be both male and female.
—Macrobius, Saturnalia, ca. AD 420
I looked out at the Mediterranean on an early summer day and speculated, as many have, why Homer once described it as “wine-dark” in color. Did some wine have a dark blue or dark green tint, or was it simply a poetic phrase for how the sea looks under stormy, rain-swollen clouds? Experts have suggested all sorts of possibilities, including color blindness among ancient Greeks.
As I walked around the ruins of a temple to Aphrodite on the island of Cyprus, I could imagine slave-powered galleys on the horizon. Crowds once gossiped here at the public baths, perhaps drinking wine and looking out at the sea just two hundred yards away. Most of the temple columns were creamy-yellow limestone, but a few had dark, dark marble laced with natural white swirls and embellished with carved spiral flutes, making them look alive with movement.
Cyprus was one of the earliest places winemaking appeared in the Mediterranean, after spreading from Egypt and the Levant. Just fifty miles south of the Turkish coast and a hundred miles west of Lebanon, the island was strategically located on early trade routes. Cypriots showed a talent for buying, selling, and making wine, perhaps as far back as five thousand years ago. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt came there to pick up perfume, copper, and wine; so did the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Persians, the Crusaders, the Ottomans, and the merchants of Venice. They all drank, bought, and fought over Cypriot wine. At the time the nearby city was called Amathus; the ruins are a few miles outside Limassol, on the southern side of the island.
The Cyprus visit also made me curious about women’s role in the origins of winemaking. The ancient Greeks believed that Aphrodite (“Venus” to the Romans) was born in the Cyprus surf, and she’s linked to early female vine goddesses. At the temple ruins I sat down in front of two grottos, called nymphaeum, nestled against the hillside at the edge of the ruins. About six feet wide, twelve feet long, and four feet deep, with an arched alcove at one end where statues once stood, the sanctuaries honored nymphs and goddesses, and were probably covered with flowers, ferns, and symbols of nature.
The earliest nymphaeum were often near natural springs; they later appeared in palaces, temples, and public baths all over the ancient world. Marriages sometimes took place at nymphaeum, along with cult rituals that held on until the dawn of Christianity. More than anything they were women’s territory. It seemed fitting that one of the few truly female wine grapes in the world is still planted on several dozen acres in Cyprus. Unlike almost all vineyard grapes, Maratheftiko, a red, isn’t a true hermaphrodite. It can’t self-pollinate. I was curious how and why farmers kept it, and what the wine tastes like.
The sun began to scorch, so I left the ruins to meet sommelier Georgios Hadjistylianou, my guide to Cypriot wine. The island’s glorious reputation for winemaking had faded by the 1980s. Native grapes suffered amidst the same tide of French wine that engulfed much of the world. About twenty years ago, though, a handful of vineyards started focusing on local varieties. Was great Cypriot wine returning, or was it like Aphrodite’s ruins—a colorful but broken echo of the past?
Georgios is that rare local wine booster who combines love of country with international perspective. Cyprus-born, he’s of average height and weight, but with an outsized personality. He has “In Vino Veritas” tattooed on his left forearm and “Riesling” and “Assyrtiko” on the right, and he is a classic sommelier—passionate about wine and food, but willing to deliver stern judgments when necessary. Georgios worked in New York City restaurants for many years, including the famous Monkey Bar on East Fifty-Fourth Street; he returned home in 2008 as co-owner of Fat Fish, an airy Limassol restaurant right on the beach, next to a yacht club.
Over several days we sampled Cypriot wines made from grapes I’d never heard of: Maratheftiko and Spourtiko reds, and Xynisteri whites. We ate halloumi, a robust, rustic goat and sheep milk cheese that can be grilled like a steak, as well as fresh squid and tiny, lightly fried fish. The local wines went perfectly with the food, yet Georgios told me that not long ago many people here shunned native grapes. This despite thousands of years of praise for Cypriot wines, including the semisweet red Commandaria, often considered one of the oldest named wines in the world. The Greeks and Romans loved it, and the English king Richard the Lionheart served something like Commandaria at his wedding in 1191. In the medieval French poem “The Battle of the Wines” Cyprus took the top spot in a contest seeking the world’s best wine. In the 1600s Italian playwrights praised Commandaria and a Cypriot white.
In 1970 the Cypriot Ministry of Agriculture started promoting popular French grapes as part of a replanting program. Georgios told me that by the 1980s it was more fashionable to drink French wines. People suggested that local grapes such as Xynisteri didn’t age well, partly because few restaurants of the era had proper wine storage facilities and poor storage led to oxidation. The big wineries chased easy money, selling huge batches of cheap alcohol to Russia and other Eastern countries.
Somehow, I’d hoped that a small Mediterranean island with grand wine traditions had escaped such forces, but no. Georgios said a few country people clung to homemade wines aged in clay containers half-buried in the ground, much as the Georgians do. They also use the entire grape cluster, including the stems, another holdover from ancient winemaking.
I asked Georgios if history inspired him, since Cypriots had been making wine for at least five thousand years. “Absolutely,” he replied. “Look, we were one of the first eight or ten nations to produce wine. How come the French, the Italians, the Germans, the Austrians—they’re way ahead in the game? I think very few people [here] had the knowledge. We produced wine, but it was more home consumption. I think this generation of producers, which started mid- to late-nineties, made great strides. The industry has changed tremendously. Now people are more knowledgeable.” As local wineries refocused on native grapes and improved vineyard management, customers responded. “We’ll see better, hopefully with the next generation, with their kids, or whoever is going to continue their work.”
“So now they’re keeping the local grapes, but using international standards of fermentation, refrigeration, and product handling?” I asked.
“Correct,” he said, and asked if I wanted to try some. I certainly did. He poured a Xynisteri from Tsiakkas Winery. It tasted of honey and flowers, with a nice balance. Georgios said it becomes drier as it ages, with hints of herbs. I asked how a tiny country could re-introduce such wines to the world, noting that there was no local Robert Parker promoting native grapes. “Parker did exceptional things for wines,” Georgios said of the man who became famous—and infamous—for grading wines on a hundred-point scale. “I wish we had Parker here. I think he sometimes gets blamed, but it’s not his fault that so many winemakers try to please him. It’s like if there’s a pretty girl and all the guys are chasing her.”
Georgios hopes that as Cypriot wines keep improving, they’ll become better known. “The first time we went to New York with the Greek varieties [in the 1990s] everybody wanted to taste them, and be the first one that ‘discovered’ Assyrtiko,” he said. Fat Fish recently built a temperature-controlled wine cellar that can hold five thousand bottles, so they’ll be able to age local wines. I wanted to meet one of this new generation of winemakers, and Georgios mentioned Marcos Zambartas.
The Zambartas Winery is located in a tiny village about fifteen miles outside of Limassol, in the foothills of the Troodos Mountains, which are covered with cypress and pine trees and snow for several months of the year. Byzantine monasteries dot the region, some dating back to the eleventh century. Copper mining began nearby around 3000 BC. Both the tree and the island are probably named after Cyparissus, a mythical boy who accidentally killed his pet stag and became so grief stricken that he turned into a tree.
Marcos Zambartas is a handsome, friendly man who studied winemaking in Australia. He met his wife there, and after training in New Zealand and France the couple came back home in 2007. Marco partnered with his father, who had cataloged native grapes decades earlier, when almost no one cared. Their winery is built into the side of a hill, with a living area upstairs and the fermentation, aging, and tasting rooms below, so the earth keeps the wine cool year-round. Zambartas, who has a chemistry degree, wanted to apply international winemaking skills to the local grapes, and change a culture that had floundered. “Until twenty years ago the focus was just on turning juice into alcohol. There was not a real understanding of the indigenous grape varieties. Whatever happened, happened,” he told me.
His late father, Akis Zambartas, set out to find native grapes in the late 1980s, seeking the forgotten vines that elderly people said their grandfathers had planted. He found twelve varieties over a three-year period. Some had names. Many did not. He kept those scarce, unknown vines because of their colors, their aromas, and their tastes. A local priest offered some land for a rare grape nursery. Akis replanted vines and tested micro-vintages made from grapes such as Promara, Spourtiko, Flouriko, Yiannoudi, Kanella, and Omoio. Experiments with Maratheftiko showed a possible link to early wine grape domestication; though it doesn’t self-pollinate well, some long-ago farmer learned to plant Spourtiko grapes next to every third vine, to boost pollination. That’s still done on Cyprus.
Today Zambartas is experimenting by using the native grapes with various French styles of winemaking. His 2014 Xynisteri used grapes harvested from a single vineyard, aged in a combination of oak and stainless steel. It was a beautiful white wine, very crisp but full-bodied and spicy. Subsequent vintages had hints of cinnamon and honey. “Slowly, slowly, we are limiting the contribution of the international grape varieties,” he said.
We tried his 2013 Maratheftiko, a silky, full-bodied red with violet and cherry aromas, and the potential to age beautifully. It seemed like madness for locals and tourists to ignore a wine like this in favor of Burgundy or Bordeaux knockoffs. Yet some travel hundreds or thousands of miles to see the ancient Cypriot churches and archaeological sites, eat the local seafood and cheeses—and then order imported Chardonnay or Pinot off the wine list.
Zambartas showed me the winery, where my questions weren’t just about the past. I asked if his chemistry degree had led him to winemaking. He said it helped. “One of the reasons I chose winemaking is because it’s the most fascinating application of chemistry.” And it’s true—winemaking is about the grapes, soil, fermentation, and aging all coming together to create flavors. “The mechanisms, they are understood to some extent, but we don’t have the full picture yet. It’s very complex chemistry in a sense [and] it just shows how little we know at the end of the day. Of course the aim of the plant is to attract predators [with flavors] to get the seeds and propagate the species.”
How flavors emerge and change chemically as wine ages flummoxed me. Zambartas knew and described how tannins soften out. “It is unpredictable, but the science behind it, it’s understood. Tannins at the beginning, they’re smaller molecules, and with time, they bind together at specific points of the molecule.” As they transform, aromas such as leather and cigar box emerge. “These aromas are because of the aging in the bottle. It’s not because of the barrel, it’s not because of the fruit, it’s not because of the fermentation,” he said.
When tannin molecules get too big they fall to the bottom of a bottle. That’s why wines lose color over time, since the tannins often contain wine pigments (such as red). Zambartas said oxygen acts to bind molecules, but it is fickle. Tannins normally absorb oxygen as part of the aging process, but if the wine absorbs oxygen too fast, the tannin molecules can’t keep up. Then aromatic molecules start absorbing the excess oxygen, which degrades them. That’s why wine needs to be stored at around 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Once it gets much warmer, the molecules and thus the aromas change.
The trickiest chemistry is balancing tradition with innovation. Zambartas wants to modernize the taste of Commandaria—roughly the Cypriot equivalent of changing the Coca-Cola formula. Customers told him the traditional Commandaria was too high in alcohol, and too sweet.
“We made one in 2011, that was the first year. We made another in 2012, it’s still [aging] in barrels,” he said. “So our philosophy . . . is to not fortify it.” Instead of the usual 15 percent alcohol, his is 12.5 to 13 percent, with higher acidity. “We haven’t bottled yet, but with a limited number of tastings, we’ve gotten very good feedback. We need to reinvent it without changing the product completely, which would be a sacrilege.” I tried a sample of his Commandaria from the barrel, as well as a popular brand from a larger winery. There was no comparison—I liked Zambartas’s far more.
We left the cool cellar, walked outside, and looked across the small valley. I saw a few vineyards nearby, but not many, despite all the stone terraces. “This used to be vineyards, this mountain, and now almost none of it is,” he said sadly. “In the summer the mountains used to be green, and now they’re brown. It is a memory of the past, all these stone walls.”
Yet Zambartas is optimistic. More and more people are noticing his wines. A small group of visitors from the British Cayman Islands, attracted by the positive local reviews, arrived as I was leaving. They loved the tastings. Zambartas admits that it was somewhat crazy to invest in a winery on Cyprus, but he and his wife are building connections in the international community. He partnered with Angela Muir, a British Master of Wine, on a program that brings winemakers from other countries to work in Cyprus. Men and women from Australia, France, and New Zealand have taken part. Visitors can also volunteer during harvest time, and receive some free bottles in return.
Before leaving Cyprus I visited another winemaker. During a tour of a newly planted vineyard I asked if the surrounding country people welcomed such efforts. No, he said, they wait for you to fall on your face with any project involving new ideas—even the replanting of local grape varieties. It was an echo of the resistance to change I heard about in Georgia and Israel, a reminder of how fragile grand traditions can be. Cypriot wines had an outstanding reputation throughout Europe for thousands of years, yet were almost pushed into oblivion in favor of cheap plonk and a few French varieties that aren’t suited to the climate.
There was more perspective at the small Cyprus Wine Museum, which opened in 2004. There were fine archaeological and cultural displays that suggested winemaking began on the island about five thousand years ago. That estimate fit with outside research, and scientists have also begun to show where the Cypriot vines fit on the overall family tree of wine. DNA analysis revealed that the Cypriot Malaga grape is genetically similar to Muscat of Alexandria, so it was probably imported from Egypt thousands of years ago. Other evidence suggested more convoluted ties. The Cypriot Moscato and Bulgarian Tamyanka are really the same grape; and they’re both related to Greek Moscato Kerkyras and Italian Moscato Bianco. No one knows which country planted them first, but it probably wasn’t Italy, given how winemaking spread from East to West. The DNA of the Cypriot grape Siderits is even more perplexing, since it isn’t closely related to other local varieties, or to regional ones. It could be a long-lost relative of a wild vine that grew on the island millennia ago, a variety introduced by one seafaring trader, or even one that evolved from a seed a bird carried to the island in the distant past. I was beginning to see that José Vouillamoz’s dream of mapping the entire wine grape family tree was far more complicated than I had imagined.
A stop in neighboring Greece showed what may be possible in Cyprus. In the 1990s the government launched agricultural and marketing programs to support local wines, which are now widely available in restaurants and wine stores across the United States.
Greece has so many wine-producing regions that I felt as though I cheated a little by stopping briefly in Athens. At the cozy wine bar Heteroclito, co-owner Marie-Madeleine Lorantos offers a staggering diversity of wine by the glass and bottle. Assyrtiko is the country’s classic white, minerally and super-crisp. Sigalas is a big, fruity, buttery red, and Avgoustiatis has beautiful, soft, violet aromas. I tried a glass of Xinomavro red. It was fruity and spicy with a distinct tomato aroma. I’d never tasted anything remotely like it.
I got a sense of Athens’s past by walking up the looping paths to the Parthenon. Completed around 438 BC, pictures don’t do full justice to its massive scale: 228 feet long by 101 feet wide, and nearly 50 feet high. The Temple of Olympian Zeus, on lower ground about one mile away, was even larger. I loitered in both places on one afternoon and stopped in front of a statue from the Theatre of Dionysus, the god of wine, where the great Greek tragedies and comedies were performed before crowds of up to sixteen thousand. The statue was of Papposilenos, a half-man-half-beast and a friend of Dionysus who was reputedly drunk all the time. The sculptor captured the sense of a wild-eyed, massive creature, with flowing beard and hair and a wooly torso, like the hide of an animal. There was a yearly Dionysia festival, held in two parts, one rural and one urban. Dionysia were characterized by Plato and others as “bacchic revels or orgies of women in honor of Dionysus, [which] carried away the participants despite and beyond themselves.” A play by Euripides has the following chorus:
Blessed is he who, being fortunate and knowing the rites of the gods, keeps his life pure and has his soul initiated into the Bacchic revels, dancing in inspired frenzy over the mountains with holy purifications, and who, revering the mysteries of great mother Kybele, brandishing the [staff], garlanded with ivy, serves Dionysus.
After returning home from Greece and Cyprus I continued reading about Aphrodite and the Dionysia. As winemaking knowledge moved west across the Mediterranean I could sense parallel changes: religions and cultures were ever so slowly moving away from the pagan rituals of the Caucasus Mountains and the Fertile Crescent.
I was used to modern versions: seeing Aphrodite as the seductive, almost innocent young woman of the Venus de Milo at the Louvre, or in Botticelli’s famous painting The Birth of Venus, which shows her perched in a scallop shell with flowing hair—an allusion to her Cypriot origins in the sea. But the early versions of her myth tell a more complicated story. Followers on Cyprus also worshipped a bisexual version named Aphroditus, later Hermaphroditus, who had a beard, breasts, and male genitals, and Cypriot seafarers worshipped a female warrior version of Aphrodite. There were Aphroditus rituals related to wine, marriage, and sacrifice, all fleeting remnants from the earliest cultures of the Fertile Crescent.
Patrick McGovern found that both human and divine females played key roles in making and selling fermented beverages in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Anatolia. Azag-Bau, a female wineshop owner, rose to high levels of society in the Egyptian Kish dynasty of 2400 BC. Women were clearly some of the earliest winemakers, entrusted to make (and sell) a precious, powerful commodity. James George Frazer, in his landmark study of myth and religion, The Golden Bough, wrote that Cypriot ceremonies for Aphrodite closely resembled the Egyptian worship of Osiris, and her cult was perhaps linked to the even older Hittite goddess Ishtar, who tried and failed to woo Gilgamesh.
The Babylonians had revered a goddess named Geštinanna, the mother of all grapevines. Siduri is a major character in The Epic of Gilgamesh, regarded as the oldest literary poem. She’s like a Mesopotamian version of Adriana La Cerva from the Sopranos; a winemaker, tavern keeper, sex symbol, and confidante to wandering men. Alarmed by Gilgamesh’s violent, ragged looks, Siduri bars the doors when he first approaches her tavern. She eventually lets him in, tries to dissuade him from a perilous journey, and after listening to his boasts gives perhaps the first example of carpe diem (“seize the day”) advice—plus tips on how to behave around women and children.
But you, Gilgamesh, let your belly be full,
Enjoy yourself always by day and by night!
Make merry each day,
Dance and play all night!
Let your clothes be clean,
Let your head be washed, may you bathe in water!
Gaze on the child who holds your hand,
Let your wife enjoy your repeated embrace.
Greeks and Romans allowed occasional wild celebrations that sound like an early version of girls’ night out. Cults dedicated to the wine god Dionysus (and the later Roman version, Bacchus), set aside three days of the year for all-female celebrations. “[It] seems evident that participation in the Dionysian orgia afforded Greek women a means of expressing their hostility and frustration at the male-dominated society, by temporarily abandoning their homes and household responsibilities and engaging in somewhat outrageous activities,” historian Ross Kraemer wrote.
Some ceremonies merely involved dancing, snake handling, or walking in the mountains at night, while others let women explore all types of sexual freedom. Men were sometimes allowed—but only when they dressed as women. The Greek Philostratus described a ceremony in the third century AD wherein “torches give a faint light, enough for the revellers to see what is close in front of them, but not enough for us to see them. Peals of laughter rise, and women rush along with men, [wearing men’s] sandals and garments girt in strange fashion; for the revel permits women to masquerade as men, and men to ‘put on women’s garb’ and to ape the walk of women.”
As I learned more about Aphrodite’s origins, ancient Cyprus emerged as both a literal and metaphorical turning point in the story of wine. Three, four, or five thousand years ago, Eastern celebrations boldly mixed wine, women, sexuality, and fertility. Greek, Roman, and eventually European civilizations all kept the wine aspect, but over time began to limit or frown on the public pagan rituals.
Macrobius, a Roman who lived in the fifth century AD, describes polysexual rituals in a book about the Saturnalia holiday (which honored the god Saturn):
There’s also a statue of Venus on Cyprus, that’s bearded, shaped and dressed like a woman, with scepter and male genitals, and they conceive her as both male and female. Aristophanes calls her Aphroditos, and Laevius says:
Worshipping, then, the nurturing god Venus, whether she is male or female, just as the Night-shiner [moon] is a nurturing goddess.
A double standard eventually developed, however. Greek and Roman men could openly drink, but sometimes women risked harsh punishments. As early as the seventh century BC Romulus said wives who drank could be sentenced to death, and around AD 30 Valerius Maximus reported that one man “beat his wife to death because she had drunk some wine. Not only did no one charge him with a crime, but no one even blamed him.” Other writers lamented that women still drank, even though it was sometimes in secret or for medicinal reasons. Juvenal, a Roman satirist who lived in the second century AD, seemed outraged and at times afraid of the passions that wine released in women.
“What decency does Venus observe when she is drunken? when she knows not one member from another, eats giant oysters at midnight, pours foaming unguents into her unmixed Falernian, and drinks out of perfume-bowls, while the roof spins dizzily round, the table dances, and every light shows double!,” Juvenal wrote in one passage. He later complained that even sacred rituals were being debauched: “[The] mysteries of the special Goddess of Women [Bona Dea] are no longer secret! Women get all stirred up with wine and wild music; they drive themselves crazy; they shriek and writhe—worshippers of Phallus. And sex. [. . .] The temple rings with the cry, ‘Bring on the Men.’ Soon they need replacements; when they run out, they jump the servants . . . We can’t even lock the women up to keep them in check. Who’d guard the guards?”
Women fought back against all the judgmental and controlling mansplainers, too—at least on stage. In 400 BC the playwright Euripides wrote The Bacchae about women who fall under Dionysus’s spell. In one passage the princess Agave and a group of women who are peacefully resting in the forest go on a rampage after men disturb them. “[M]en are hunting us down! Follow, follow me! Use your wands for weapons,” Agave cried, and the men fled. Dionysus relates what happened next:
[We] barely missed being torn to pieces by the women. Unarmed, they swooped down upon the herds of cattle grazing there on the green of the meadow. And then you could have seen a single woman with bare hands tear a fat calf, still bellowing with fright, in two, while others clawed the heifers to pieces . . . Then the villagers, furious at what the women did, took to arms. And there, sire, was something terrible to see. For the men’s spears were pointed and sharp, and yet drew no blood, whereas the wands the women drew inflicted wounds. And then the men ran, routed by women! Some god, I say, was with them.
Historians haven’t found evidence that ancient women really went on rampages while worshipping Aphrodite and Dionysus, but the Euripides play clearly reflected at least subliminal tensions.
Tastings
It’s easy to find Greek wines in many stores and restaurants across the United States, and online. Cyprus is a bit harder—you might have to go there! I strongly suspect some of the Cyprus reds will age well, but that’s just a guess.
Cyprus
Zambartas Winery
Other small, respected Cyprus wineries include Ezousa, Tsiakkas, and Vlassides.
Greece
Domaine Glinavos, in the village of Zitsa
Methymnaeos Organic Wines, on the island of Lesvos
Gaia Wines, Athens
“Ritinitis Nobilis” Retsina Estate Argyros, on the island of Santorini
Domaine Foivos, on the Ionian Islands
Papia, western Macedonia Domaine Sigalas, on the island of Santorini
Mavrotragano–Mandilaria (red)