It is a sweet, fortified wine - if you've ever had Port or Icewein then I expect this would be similar. The grapes are harvested and then left in the sun so that evaporation concentrates the sugars. Today's Commandaria is aged several years in oak barrels - in ancient times the wine would have been stored in big terra cotta jugs.
I'd like to try this sometime, if only for the history of the thing.
You can read about a more or less recent tasting here.
7 comments:
Very interesting, thanks for the history lesson. I'm going to see if I can find it at Total Wine.
Oh, this sounds delightful, both for the wine and history. Thanks for sharing Borepatch!
I was stationed on Cyprus in the late 70's and I have had this wine many times. It tastes as though you are eating raisins. I miss the wine, I miss the island.
Agree with Unk. It's VERY sweet. Ironically, we got a few bottles in Souda Bay in the exchange.
I’d like to give that a go too...
Nice find, and you can see why they they watered their wine, too strong otherwise. There's an echo of this in the Eucharist, curiously, the chalice is "mixed" -- water and wine.
Very often used as communion wine in the Greek Orthodox Church.
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