Polite surprise, frowning disapproval, outright pity - these were the reactions of most wine types when your correspondent revealed the summer holiday scheme. Greece? Two weeks of Demestica or that deadly Retsina . . . my dear, how could you? Night after night, sitting by the water's edge in Cephalonia's prettiest port, I raised a glass to the sceptics. A glass of crisp white Robola, the local speciality, sometimes; or tangy Strofilia from Attica, or some soft, ripe red wine from Macedonia or the Peloponnese.
Not a drop of Retsina, I promise you. Not because of the taste, but the bitter memory. Years ago, too much of that resinous oddity one lunchtime induced me to fall asleep on a beach in Crete and wake up with lethal sunstroke. These days, with so many other wines emerging, it's easily avoided.
The Greek wine industry has been fighting gallantly over the past decade or two to improve the range and standard of its output - but, rather like the Trojan War, the struggle has gone on for quite some time without a major breakthrough. In wine marketing terms, that means only one thing: the message hasn't yet got through to the rest of the world that Greece is a force worth taking seriously. "The last 10 to 15 years have seen an amazing change in the Greek wine scene," Maggie McNie, the British Master of Wine who has worked energetically as a consultant to the Greek wine industry, wrote a few months ago in an article headed "Waking the Giants" in Decanter magazine. "It is as if an industry which had been sleeping ever since the fall of Constantinople has suddenly awoken. It has at last submitted its claim to be accepted once more as the fine wine-making country that it was in classical times." But the change has come "too quickly for the buying world outside Greece to have yet discovered the range of well made wines now available," she admits.
The first inkling I had of the progress afoot came almost four years ago, when McNie hosted a Greek wine tasting dinner in the Shelbourne. It was an eye-opener, a palate puzzler: over a dozen intriguing wines, made from grapes I'd never heard of - white, rose and red - culminating in rich, port-like Mavrodaphne. Alas, the Greek Wine Bureau in London, which masterminded promotional activity of this sort, has since been closed down for budgetary reasons. But some of the most appealing wines tasted that night have since made their way quietly into the Irish market, alongside a host of others.
"Greece was the word, is the word and will continue to be the word - just as long as we've got anything to do with it," bubbles Oddbins in its current Irish brochure, listing 30 Greek wines. "Welcome, intrepid explorers, to Greece, our latest discovery in the wine world and one of the most exciting ever.
"Do the words Moschofilero, Assyrtico, Robola and Roditis mean anything to you? What could they be . . . obscure islands in the Aegean gulf? Mongolian soft drinks brands? Breeds of sheep, perhaps? Well, they're grape varieties. Indigenous grapes - no more, no less. Ones that have been growing on Greek soil for centuries - millennia, even. Now do you see why we're so excited about Greece? "
Whatever you may think about this slightly overheated prose, Oddbins is absolutely right. To drinkers washed out with too much Chardonnay, Cabernet and other over-familiar varietal wines, Greece offers a change as welcome as brilliant sun after too many Grecian 2000-coloured Irish skies. Sometimes the international varieties crop up, but in the most interesting wines they are blended with native grapes - bizarre beauties like Limnio, Agiogitiko, Xinomavro, sounding like characters from an obscure Greek drama.
Dunnes Stores is also enthusiastic about Greece, this summer adding a new white wine to the two splendid reds from Tsantalis, a major producer in northern Greece with an extensive range of well-made wines. "It's taken me over a year to combat negative attitudes towards Greek products in the Irish market," says Penny Simpson, a former lecturer in consumer behaviour who imports the three Tsantalis wines, Eleaon Olive oil (also new to Dunnes), feta cheese and olives. She expects to expand her Greek wine portfolio soon. "I've simply sourced the best products and let people taste them. There's also a competitive advantage, given the value of the drachma."
Certainly, the Tsantalis wines offer unbeatable value - not always the case in my holiday bottles, some of which tasted as if they were worth a pound or two less than their price tags: maybe a case of Ye Olde Tourist Margin. And not all were delicious, I'm bound to say. Wine-loving visitors may still be put off too many Greek wines because they're served freezer-cold or - worse - unbelievably warm and flabby-tasting, having had the life roasted out of them through months of careless storage in the sun.
Indeed, you may be better off tasting them here. It has just occurred to me that, small though Greece's slice of the Irish market may be (it's estimated at roughly half of Hungary's share, and less than a quarter of Bulgaria's, two other minor players), there are more Greek wines in Dublin now than I encountered in an assiduous two-week hunt through the restaurants and shops of a wine-producing Ionian island. There's a good mix, too: some big outfits like Boutari and Tsantalis, some dynamic players like Kostas Lazaridis and George Skouras and one or two smaller producers. Sadly, Domaine Carras, an early trailblazer in the Greek renaissance, is up for sale and no longer sending its impressive wines to Kevin Parsons in Cork.