Five Thousand Years: Wine in Ancient Cyprus
Cyprus makes a strong claim to the longest wine culture in the Mediterranean, and unlike most such claims it rests on laboratory analysis rather than on tradition alone.
The Erimi flasks
Between 1932 and 1935 the archaeologist Porphyrios Dikaios excavated a Chalcolithic settlement on the edge of Erimi, west of Limassol, and recovered fragments of round flasks dated to between 3500 and 3000 BC.
They then sat in museum collections for roughly seventy years before anyone tested what had been inside them.
What the residue proved
In 2005 a team led by the Italian archaeologist Maria Rosaria Belgiorno analysed eighteen of the fragments and found tartaric acid — a chemical marker for grapes — in twelve of them.
That places wine in Cypriot pottery around five and a half thousand years ago, the oldest such evidence found anywhere in the Mediterranean basin. There is a wine museum at Erimi itself built around the find.
Continuity, not just antiquity
Age on its own is a weak claim: plenty of places made wine early and then stopped. What distinguishes Cyprus is that production never entirely broke, with monasteries carrying viticulture through the centuries when commercial winemaking contracted.
Commandaria is the clearest surviving thread. A sweet wine from sun-dried grapes, made in the same villages, with a documented history running back many centuries and a method that has not fundamentally changed — Co-op Commandaria Winery and Revecca Traditional Winery both still work in that idiom.
Where the history is visible
Beyond the museum at Erimi, the archaeological collections in Nicosia hold Chalcolithic material alongside later evidence of the island's wine trade. In Paphos, Sterna Winery keeps a wine museum of its own at Kathikas.
For the living version, the Commandaria villages north of Limassol are the place to go. The line between what the archaeology shows and what is in the glass is shorter there than anywhere else on the island.
Related wineries
Contact details and locations for each are on their page.
More guides
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