Greek Wine Tours: 20 Tours, All on Santorini

Every Greek wine tour we sell leaves from Santorini. There is nothing in Nemea, Naoussa or Crete, three places with serious wine and cellar doors, and the gap is about what travellers can book, not about Greek wine. Treat the country page as a map with one dot on it. The dot is well stocked: twenty tours, fourteen operators, prices that stay inside a tight band of 150 to 200 EUR for the middle half. That is the second narrowest spread of the 13 countries, after Canada.

A country with one destination should not borrow the destination's content, so the price, the inclusions and the operators are on the Santorini page. Here the question is different: what sits behind the island, and how does Greece compare with everywhere else?

A Greek bottle with a PDO on the label (protected designation of origin) follows the strictest rules: a named area, named grapes, yield and ageing limits. An IGP (protected geographical indication) allows a wider area and a freer blend. Santorini is a PDO, recognised in 1971 and covering Santorini and Thirasia. For the dry white, Wines of Greece gives a minimum of 85% Assyrtiko. Wines made outside the PDO but on the Cyclades can be labelled IGP Cyclades.

Three Greek names will get you through a wine list: assyrtiko for the white of the islands, xinomavro for the red of the north, agiorgitiko for the red of the south.

The four names are a starting point. We have not built pages for the three without tours, and we quote no hectares or production for them.

The chart puts Greece between the expensive group (the USA and Argentina at 242 EUR, France at 232) and the crowd of mid-priced countries around 120 to 145. Two things stand out. The Greek bar is short, 150 to 200 EUR. And the number of tours behind it is the smallest: 20, against 300 in Italy and 211 in France.

Greece has the highest hotel pickup share, 95%, and ties with Canada for the shortest day, at four hours. That is the shape of an island product: a short drive between wineries and a pickup at the hotel. Compare Italy, where 28% of the tours offer pickup and the median day is 5.5 hours, or Georgia, where the day is nine hours and the price is less than half. The country pages for Portugal, Italy, Spain and Georgia take the same measures region by region.

Divide each country's median price by its median length and Greece comes out first, ahead of the USA. It is a crude measure, a ratio of two medians, but it shows what the short island day costs per hour. Greece: about 43 EUR an hour. The USA: 40. Argentina: 35. France: 33. Italy: 26. Spain: 18. Portugal: 17. Georgia: 9.

The figure says more about format than about value. A four-hour tour with hotel pickup, a guide and a driver is priced like a private half day, while a nine-hour Georgian day includes a long road. If you want the most wine for an hour of your time, Greece is not the cheapest place to find it. If you want a neat afternoon, it may be the tidiest.

Santorini Day Tours has 42% of the reviews and My Santorini Tour 33%. Their two best tours, both rated 5.0, carry 3,517 of the 5,675 reviews, or 62%. So the highest rating on the site belongs to two tours. It is high partly because so many guests reviewed them, and partly because a rating with thousands of votes behind it does not swing. It does not prove that Greece makes better wine tours than Australia, where the same measure is 4.91 over 99 tours and 32,114 reviews.

Greece's legal limit for drivers is 0.5 g/l of blood alcohol, and 0.2 g/l for new drivers and professional drivers. Nineteen of the twenty Santorini tours offer hotel pickup, and on one of them it costs extra. That makes hiring a car for a tasting day a poor trade. We have not checked ferry or bus timetables and do not quote them.