living like elle

Cyprus wine! I love this topic. Cyprus was the first place on this voyage so far that I did a professional guided wine tour. My tour guide was the best tour guide I could have asked for and I found it very fascinating that in order to be a tour guide for the Cyprus Taste Tour company they actually had to go through extensive training on wine and take multiple wine courses. I loved this because the tour guide and I could talk for hours, we had so much in common just from our passion for wine. 

On this tour we went to three wineries and I learned the ins and outs of Cyprus wine. I was treated with amazing hospitality and even got a job offer at one of the wineries. I loved the wineries that we visited because they were all completely opposite from each other so we got a little taste of what all of Cyprus had to offer. I also love visiting different style wineries because it makes me brainstorm and daydream of what I hope I want my winery to be like someday. 

When on the wine tour I learned how special Cyprus wine actually is. Cyprus is such a small island that they do not export outside of their country. So, if you want Cyprus wine you literally have to buy it from Cyprus or get in contact with a winery from Cyprus and they will ship it to the USA for a massive fee of course. This is because the grape vines in Cyprus are different from anything else I have ever seen or learned about. The vines in Cyprus are designed and adapted to not using irrigation which I found fascinating. The vines get away with not needing irrigation because the vines are placed in rocky places; on mountain sides for example. This is because in Cyprus they only have a few months a year where it has a possibility of raining, when it does rain the water from the rain is soaked up into the rocks where the vines are planted and throughout the year the vines suck up their moisture from the rocks they are planted on. Fascinating. 

This leads to another very interesting topic; Cyprus has all of their own varieties of grapes. These are varieties I have never heard of before, and I have never tasted anything like them either. They have their own varietals because they have too, they don’t irrigate year-round like most places in the world do so these grape varietals are accustomed to grow how they want them to grow in Cyprus, it was so interesting. Cyprus of course has imported some more common vines like Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz, and Cabernet Franc but these vines that did not start in Cyprus need to be irrigated, therefore the winemakers in Cyprus have very little of these vines and don’t particularly like growing them. 

Cyprus takes the grape skins and excess after the crush period and makes it into compost so that their next vintage will grow better with the compost of the previous vintage. The cost of wine in Cyprus is also very inexpensive compared to the places I have visited so far and the US. The average cost for an amazing bottle of Wine was around 9 euros. From the wineries I visited and the knowledge I took away most of the wine in Cyprus you must purchase at the wineries themselves, very little of them sell to the grocery stores because they are all smaller wineries and can’t produce enough to sell to all the grocery stores in Cyprus and still have enough to run their tasting rooms, therefor they don’t mass produce. 

Like I said before, the wine in Cyprus is like nothing I have ever tried before, I am so grateful that I have the opportunity to travel the world expanding my palate and learning about different kinds of wine. Who knows, maybe I’ll head back to the winery that offered me a job after this voyage and live in Cyprus for a little bit learning even more. 

I loved Cyprus and I loved Cypriot wine, the history of the wine was so amazing to learn about and I will definitely have to travel back to Cyprus in order to drink their wine again sometime in the near future.