Lesbos wine

An apocryphal account details one of the brothers of the poet Sappho as a merchant trading Lesbos wine with the Greek colony of Naucratis in Egypt.

After harvest, they were piled in large containers to the point that the weight of the clusters crushed the grapes underneath them producing free run juice without the use of a wine press.

The Greek writer Athenaeus used the term in almost a generic way to refer to any dark, long lived wine of good quality.

[3] In the beginning of the 19th century the spread of phylloxera to Lesbos as well as the island's specialization in ouzo led to the stagnation of Lesbian wine production.

This variety, saved from extinction by phylloxera because of its use by the winery, is cultivated on the sulfuric lava which formed the Petrified Forest of Lesbos.