Peter Pharos

By now this is so well-known that repeating it enters broken record territory. The biggest story for Greek wine the past 20 years has been the rise of Assyrtiko. From a Santorinian oddity / best-kept secret to international fame, it did more than any other grape variety to put Greek wines on the map. It also built a certain perception of, and expectation from, Greek white wine: it should be sharp, acidic, mineral.

Though technically I have an account, I have steered clear of Substack, which gives me the vibe of a methadone clinic for recovering Twitter addicts. The vertiginous dopamine highs of hundreds of likes and multi-thread comments have long gone. Instead, users administer tiny amounts of artisanal interactions to one another. Humblingly, a good part of the site is Dear Diary stuff.

It feels odd today, but there was a time when science was considered an aristocratic pursuit. Tycho Brahe was a nexus of Danish noble lineage, Lavoisier was the intellectual face of the Ancien Régime, while Darwin was the happy beneficiary of decades of haute bourgeois accumulation. Even Newton, often taken as the plebeian of the lot, was the son of a wealthy landowner – 17th century Cambridge was not known for recruiting from the working classes.