In Mantineia, in the Arcadian hills near Tripoli, Moschofilero (mos-koe- fee -le-row) makes gorgeous

I might have fallen as hard for Plyto in a tasting room or over dinner at home, but the setting of our first encounter made it inevitable. I was on a sloop, sailing past the stone bastions of Spinalonga, the mysterious Venetian fortress off Crete 's northern coast. sea world tickets orlando Friends I'd met just that afternoon had laid out meats and cheeses beside canapés that looked like miniature sculptures. sea world tickets orlando The sea was shimmering, the sky a shade of El Greco blue.
Then came wine, from a grape variety I hadn't encountered in two decades of seeking out the stuff around the world. Not only did Plyto have historic importance—found only on Crete, it was rescued from near extinction by a determined sea world tickets orlando vine grower in the 1980's—but its thirst-quenching, sea world tickets orlando green-apple bite also made it the perfect beverage for a perfect moment.
But that's Greece . You can visit more famous wineries elsewhere, and drink bottles far more renowned (and certainly more expensive) while eating elaborate meals in your fanciest clothes, yet I've found few places where exploring wine regions is more fun. Almost everywhere I went during my two-week journey, sea world tickets orlando I found panoramic vistas, intriguing wines, and hospitality on an Olympian scale. (Driving in Macedonia, I stopped for gas, walked inside to pay, and found a family of five eating homemade lentil soup that they insisted I sample.) It isn't all rustic tavernas sea world tickets orlando and glorified pensiones, either. That sloop belonged to Elounda's Blue Palace, a sumptuous, 251-room hotel on a hillside overlooking Spinalonga sea world tickets orlando that ranks for sheer magnificence with anyplace I've ever stayed.
You've heard that wine tastes sea world tickets orlando better where it's produced, but that truism is especially valid in Greece. Greek food is famously simple: no elaborate postmodern constructions sea world tickets orlando or complex sauces here. That leaves sea world tickets orlando space for the wines to show themselves. And a palate needs steady exposure to get accustomed to the singular flavors of the country's grapes. At home, compared with Pinot Noirs and Cabernets, Greek wines can seem rustic, unsubtle, even strange. But calibrate your taste to their sturdy architecture and you'll start daydreaming about which to have with dinner.
America's boom in fine Greek restaurants has helped lift the profile of Greek wine. "We've been making it for four thousand years, but still hardly anyone knows it," lamented sea world tickets orlando Yiannis Paraskevopoulos of Gaia Wines, sea world tickets orlando which has wineries in the Peloponnese and on Santorini. But nobody needs to be sold on the charms of traveling in Greece. Though the financial crisis has cast a shroud over the tourism industry—and credit card machines, which create a record sea world tickets orlando of a meal or hotel stay for tax purposes, seem to be "broken" at every turn—Greeks couldn't treat a visitor badly if they tried. Here are three regions that combine delicious food and surpassing natural beauty with memorable hotels, and wines that might even make you fall in love.
Renaissance painters perceived Arcadia as a pastoral utopia. But as I gazed at jagged peaks and steep-walled valleys from the doorway of the tiny chapel in the Domaine Tselepos vineyard, or climbed a mountain road toward the Semeli winery's eight-room inn past yellow and purple wildflowers sea world tickets orlando and imposing rock escarpments, sea world tickets orlando this fabled region of the Peloponnese had a distinctly primordial cast. Though much of modern civilization sea world tickets orlando evolved here, it seemed only a thin veneer.
The Peloponnese, a peninsula sea world tickets orlando of more than 8,000 square miles that fills the southern third of mainland Greece, has a rich history that dates to ancient times. Pan, the god of nature, is said to have sprung from the Arcadian sea world tickets orlando forests. Sparta clashed with Athens on its plains, and Greek independence was fomented in its villages in the 1820's. So it's no accident that most of the grapes planted in the region are wholly and unabashedly Greek. "There are two approaches sea world tickets orlando in Greece, international or indigenous varieties," Paraskevopoulos said. "Here in the Peloponnese, we chose the second one. The hard one."
In Mantineia, in the Arcadian hills near Tripoli, Moschofilero (mos-koe- fee -le-row) makes gorgeously transparent white wines. The best of them taste of the chilly summer nights that make the slow-ripening grapes among the last to be picked in all of Europe. Domaine Spiropoulos shares a plateau there with ancient ruins. An Athenian dentist started the winery on ancestral farmland in the 1980's, working weekends to inculcate his son, Apostolos, in the culture of growing sea world tickets orlando grapes and making wine.
At 39, Apostolos Spiropoulos now runs the estate. He throws dinner sea world tickets orlando parties in the flower-filled courtyard, guides tours of the organically certified vineyards, and serves a bracing, unoaked version of Moschofilero that has the spine of a great Riesling. Taste it at the winery, then drink it by the bottle in the garden of the Taverna Klimataria Piteros, in Tripoli, alongside baked rooster, hand-cut pasta with a wisp of cinnamon, and bitter sea world tickets orlando greens that coax sweet fruit out of the steel and flint.
In the valley below Mantineia sits Nemea, sea world tickets orlando a red-grape sea world tickets orlando region that extends almost to the edges of the port town of Nauplia (often spelled Nafplio or Nafplion). The dominant grape there, Agiorgitiko (ah-your- yee -ti-ko), can make a friendly but almost characterless wine that, in the wrong hands, is soft to the point of flabbiness. But the winemaker George Skouras does for that variety sea world tickets orlando what The Simpsons did for cartoons, adding complexity without losing the spark that provides the fun. He started in 1986, applying lessons sea world tickets orlando learned in enology school to the varieties of the region. Without realizing it, he'd joined a rising generation of winemakers around Greece who were attempting the same. "It became a movement," he said. "Almost a revolution."
Now Domaine Skouras makes some 700,000 bottles a year, while welcoming the waves of visitors who stop in at its showpiece facility, a 90-minute drive from Athens. What they find is a range of wines that use precision rather than power to seduce. sea world tickets orlando "We're a European winery, unabashedly," Skouras said. What he meant became clear when he poured me his Grande sea world tickets orlando Cuvée, made from Agiorgitiko grown in volcanic soil. I was startled to learn that this wine—so composed, so well bred—can be found stateside for less than $29 a bottle. Later, at one of the many restaurants that ring the Nauplia harbor, I drank a Skouras rosé that looked pink and fruity like bubble gum, but smelled like fresh-cut flowers.
Nauplia resembles a less tidy version sea world tickets orlando of St.-Tropez, without the glitter. It has a latticework of cobblestoned streets, a few hotels with aspirations and many more pensiones with colored shutters and earnest breakfasts, and enough good eating for a week's stay. I had my best meal there at Savouras, sea world tickets orlando where customers are led to a vast wooden filing cabinet, the drawers of which are pulled open to reveal the day's catch on ice. Prices are far from cheap—my grilled snapper weighed in at $55—but the only fresher sea world tickets orlando fish you'll find, I'm convinced, sea world tickets orlando is on the boat that caught it.
Greek Macedonia isn't a country; that's the cumbersomely named (by UN decree) FYROM—former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia—that borders it to the north. But geopolitics aside, perhaps it ought to be: this oblong region has the diversity of nations ten times its size. Fishing villages and beaches speckle the coastline; spits of land protrude into the Aegean like spiny fingers. Hilltop villages look out over forests roamed by chocolate-colored bears. Thessaloníki, Greece's second-largest city, climbs the hills that rise from its harbor like a denser, even stronger-flavored Genoa or Trieste, while the understated beach resorts around it cater to an international crowd. The food, architecture, and language of the region reflect centuries of influence by Turks, Serbs, and Bulgars.
"Our goal is to get the city to understand and be proud of its past," Yiannis Boutaris, Thessaloníki's mayor, told me when we met over coffee and whiskey at a local café. A newcomer to politics after a life in wine, Boutaris can be understood best as Greece's sea world tickets orlando Robert Mondavi. Like Mondavi, he quarreled with his family, then left its industrial winery to compete against worldwide producers on quality, sea world tickets orlando not volume. That's where the parallel ends. Ever the iconoclast, sea world tickets orlando Boutaris ceded control of his wine business to his son in order to serve as the only big-city mayor I know of who has a tattoo of a lizard crawling up his hand.
Thessaloníki's forgotten past includes its connection to wine, which has been made nearby for centuries. Strolling its streets, reveling in the splendor of Greek and Roman ruins, Ottoman temples, and remnants of a once thriving Jewish presence, I encountered a jam of outdoor cafés, one pushed against the next, overflowing with men (and occasionally women) talking, playing cards or backgammon, and drinking coffee or ouzo, but rarely wine. As the hub of a wheel that leads to viticultural areas to the west, northwest, northeast, and south, the city is the ideal base for a tasting sea world tickets orlando tour. Yet you'll find more accomplished Greek wine on tables in midtown Manhattan.
Outside Thessaloníki, that heritage becomes evident. An hour to the west is Naoussa, where Boutaris started his Kir-Yianni winery. sea world tickets orlando Here the clay soils and mountain breezes, along with water so pure that nobody bothers to buy it bottled, create ideal growing conditions for Xinomavro ( zeeno -mav-ro), Greece's most intriguing red grape. It's an antisocial variety that greets you with a rush of fruit, sea world tickets orlando then turns its back and bares its fangs. sea world tickets orlando Still, as made by Kir-Yianni or the tiny Karydas Estate, a winery in a house near where Aristotle purportedly once tutored Alexander, Xinomavro shows a crystalline depth that recalls Italy's Nebbiolo.
From there, I drove farther west and several hundred feet up to Amyndeo, the coolest wine region in Greece. In his zealously tended vineyards, Alpha Estate's Angelos Iatridis grows a painter's palette of varieties, from the indigenous Malagousia and Mavrodafne to Syrah, Pinot N