£14.95, The Wine Society Just the sight of the words Santorini and Assyrtiko on the label will be enough for some people to reach straight for their credit cards – and the price of this bottle is even more of an incentive. There's no white wine quite like Assyrtiko from the Aegean island of Santorini. The Assyrtiko grape is now widely grown in Greece, but it produces its highest quality and most distinctive wines in Santorini's exceptional, hot, dry, sunny and windy condition

No one knows quite how many indigenous grape varieties Greece has, because so many take different names in different regions and have developed different characteristics even when they share the same DNA. A conservative estimate would be about 180, perhaps 200. Either way it’s nothing like as many as there are in Italy, but Greece has a trump card: the white Assyrtiko grape. Archetypal Santorini: church and vineyard. The 30-square mile volcanic island has 600 churches, it hav

I like classic wines made from so-called noble grape varieties as much as anyone, but there’s a thrill of a different kind in wines that push the frontiers. I wrote about a batch of these boundary-pushers last September in The next big thing… There was a wine from Kazakstan, Czech Pinot Noir, Azores wine from 100-year-old vines, orange wine from the Mosel, German Chardonnay, wine from an exceedingly rare Greek grape, mould-breaking Canadian wines, Turkish rosé – none, of cour