The vineyard of ancient Athens. At the symposion, the city's citizens drank Attic wine mixed with water from painted kraters, and the philosophy of the classical age was argued over its cups. The amphorae that carried it were sealed with pine resin — a practical habit whose taste the Greeks came to prize, and which survives today as retsina, long made chiefly from Attic savatiano.
The Mesogeia plain still farms savatiano beside the runways of Athens' airport, on some of the driest vineyard land in Greece — drought-hardy old bush vines that need no irrigation. The capital's sprawl is the modern phylloxera, paving vineyard land year by year, even as a new generation proves that low-yield savatiano can make serious, age-worthy dry whites.