Islands beckon the holiday traveller: their watery girdle seems to guarantee inaccessibility. You can’t be reeled back on a whim – as you might, so easily, up a motorway, down a river, from a city of the plain. Europe’s sunnier holiday islands encourage you to nest a bottle of wine among the dirty washing in your case on your way home: Tenerife, Sardinia, Madeira. One insists on it: Santorini. This 73-square-kilometre horseshoe, very nearly the final crumb of the Cyclades, is a wine beacon. Here’s why.
This island, inhabited for at least 4,000 years, was in ancient times called Kalliste, meaning “the best” or “the most beautiful”. A later name was Thera – or Strogili, “the rounded”. It’s a geological remnant today: neither beautiful nor rounded.
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