Dazzling Oia strung along the cliff above the caldera of Santorini and its tiny harbour Ammoudi - a great place to eat!
We stayed in the Santo Maris Oia, a beautiful hotel perched on the cliffs above the sea with a wide view over the caldera. Our suite was in an individual building and very spacious, with an expansive terrace and small, heated jacuzzi pool.
As promised, we had a great view of spectacular sunsets.
We ate a couple of times at Santo Maris, timed to watch the sun set over the caldera. Even had a surprisingly good red wine : Scalarea - shiraz and kotsifali from Heraklion, Crete.
It was only a few minutes walk into Oia which has one of the most famous views of Santorini.
It also has a very good ice cream shop, Lolita's, which we visited many times, trying the different flavours. Finally settled on chocolate, mango sorbet and lemon sorbet.
The tiny harbour of Ammoudi below Oia is reached via a long staircase of hundreds of steps. We walked down in the morning to have lunch at one of the tavernas squeezed onto the narrow harbour front.
We arrived in perfect time to sit down at the Sunset restaurant with a cold Mythos beer and decide on lunch.
I had a very good Greek salad - the local tomatoes and capers are excellent, and we shared a large red snapper chosen from the cabinet, which was superb and didn't need the lemony sauce with it, though this was also very good. A decent chilled white wine went very well with the meal.
We haven't had many good Greek wines but are always willing to give them a chance. In fact we had a few decent Greek wines on Santorini so we hoped this visit would be a good learning exercise.
The tour and tasting began at 4pm, each wine paired with a local dish which was rather nice.
We were welcomed with a sparkling wine from northern Greece then taken into the vineyard to see the vines. The ground is very dry and the white wine vines are spiralled low to the surface to conserve moisture and to protect the grapes from the sun and wind - it is often quite windy here and there is very little rain.
The vines have roots 10m deep and overnight humidity allows moisture to collect under the leaves which helps, and these vines survive without irrigation. They also cultivate some red wine grapes more traditionally in a low vertical framework, but these need irrigating.
Yields are low, grapes are small but intense.
We had five tasting wines, the first three white, the fourth a red, and the fifth an excellent Vin Santo, at 10% the least alcoholic but easily the best. All the wines were OK.
At the other end of the island to Oia, right at the south west tip, is the lighthouse. It isn't open to the public but there are spectacular views of the caldera from the road leading to it.
At the lighthouse the views are over the western caldera and southern Aegean.
We had a good lunch at Giorgaros close by, a large family-run taverna overlooking the caldera, which served us excellent red mullet. The fish is very fresh and we chose from a selection in their chilled cabinet.
