Greece's legendary winery looks to future to China

A liquor with a red ruby color, named after Daphne, Gustav's late fiance, Mavrodaphne is one of the company's best seller products. It is the wine used in the Holy Communion in Greek Orthodox Church.

The 1873 wine is not for sale, but a bottle containing a few drops of the 1896 production, the year of the first modern Olympics, reaches up to 1,500 euros (2,055 U.S. dollars), while a three-year-old wine costs about 5 euros.

In one of the big oak carved barrels at the Imperial Cellar, Athena, the goddess of wisdom in ancient Greek mythology, is depicted offering wine to Hercules.

At the end of the tour, after taking a look at the two biggest barrels in Greece manufactured in 1882 in Trieste and each containing 13,195 liters of Mavrodaphne, Rapti and her colleagues offer visitors a unique opportunity to taste some of the excellent quality wine.

The winery, located among the vineyards, is one of the topmost tourist sites in the region, attracting some 100,000 visitors per year. Before the crisis, the numbers were double. Still visitors leave the site impressed.

"I feel as if I discovered a treasure today. This winery is part of our history. We need to work to preserve it and promote it," Yorgos Kontos, an engineer who was visiting a friend in a nearby village, told Xinhua, while posing in front of a barrel containing the production of 1940, when Greece entered World War II.

Among dignitaries who have visited the winery are the Empress Sissy of Austria, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and Hungarian composer Franz Liszt in the 19th century.