We had a quiet day, our food and wine tour didn’t start until 3:30pm.
So we had a late breakfast, I added photos to yesterday’s blog post (was way too late to do it last night!), and then I went for a walk east from our hotel, Oia is west from us. I had a look at the little village of Krinaki, and had a look at a taverna, Krinaki Taverna, we plan to have lunch at tomorrow. The Taverna looked good. 
The village sits on the northern slopes of this part of the island, and the slopes can and do get very steep very quickly as I found out as I explored away from the main roads. 
There is a lot of accommodation here, but my guess is that it is the more economical priced places, as they don’t have the Caldera view and are a fair distance from Oia. Don’t get me wrong, they all looked very comfortable.
There are lots of cats all over the bits of Greece we have been to, here is no different. They all look healthy, I think the locals/tourists keep them well fed.
My walk was interesting, lots of little laneways, various accommodation, a few churches, a cemetery, a cliff top BBQ, amazing views and I found the local desalination plant. 
They have to desalination their water from the sea as the rainfall is seasonal and there isn’t really anywhere to store it. Even though their water is all desalinated they still ensure everyone drinks bottled water as the volcanic nature of the seawater used in the desalination plants carries a distinct flavour and smell with it even after processing.
Late afternoon we did a wine tour. There were 10 of us on the tour, 8 Americans and us. Our tour guide was Elsa and our driver was Thomas.
Our itinerary was to visit 3 wineries, 2 in the central area of Santorini and 1 in the north.
Santorini has 32 Indiginous Grape varieties, of which less than 10 are used commercially to grow wine grapes. Vines on the island are up to 200 years old and to date haven’t been infected by phylloxera because the roots go down 8 metres
We started at Art Space Winery. 
This winery is one of the oldest on the island, being started in 1861, and has only a very small production of 10,000 bottles per season. All their wines are organically grown and the vines are grown in the uniquely traditional Santorini style where the vines are grown not on trellises but close to the ground in a basket shape. The vines are trained into a circle of about 60cm and close to the ground. This technique is called Santorini Kouloura and the resulting structure is called a basket or nest. This helps prevent the vines from wind damage, helps them retain atmospheric water and encourages the Grape bunches inside the circle. The vines are dry grown, no watering. All the grapes are hand picked, harvest must be more backbreaking than traditional trellis vines!
We were shown around the winery, they had an area preserved where the grapes used to be foot stomped, they had a small area and a much larger area, the large area had storage for 3000 litresof stomped Grape juice!
For their sweet wines, they sun dry the grapes for two weeks, until they resemble raisins. And then press them. It takes three times as many Grapes per litre of wine as compared to traditional methods.
We tried 5 wines here, 3 whites, a Rose and a desert wine. We preferred the second wine, an Aidavi and the last, a 10 year old Vinsanto , a sweet red similar to a sherry, was my favourite.
They also produce Ouzo, but we never saw or sampled this. They also distil the Grape skins and seeds that are left over from the wine production to make a spirit, similar to the Italian Grappa.
The next winery was Artemis Karamolegos Winery, the 3rd largest in Santorini, producing around 200,000 bottles a year. Interestingly, they are experimenting with trellising their red vines. But the trellising is only about 1m high and must be irrigated as the vines cannot trap any moisture from the air. They are also experimenting with screw caps verses corks, they seem to be favouring cork. The winery had a large garden set up to supply its restaurant, impressive. We tried 4 wines here, a Rose, 2 whites and a red.
The third and final winery we went to was Sigalas Winery, not far from Oia. The winery was established in 1996 and was large by Santorini standards. All their red grapes are grown on low trellised vines. The wines here were comparable to the first two. We had three whites and an aged red sweet wine.
Our day finished around 8pm
