Commandaria

Commandaria is Cyprus's ancient amber dessert wine — a rich, sweet speciality made from sun-dried Xynisteri (white) and Mavro (dark) grapes grown on the southern slopes of the Troodos mountains. Often called the oldest named wine still in production, it descends from a Cypriot sweet wine the ancient Greeks knew as nama and takes its modern name from the Commandaria, the medieval estate of the crusading Knights Hospitaller (and earlier the Templars) around Kolossi. The grapes are picked late and left to raisin in the sun, concentrating their sugar; the wine is fermented, fortified in most modern styles, and matured for years, taking on a deep amber-to-mahogany colour and flavours of raisin, fig, date, honey, carob, caramel and dried orange. Sweet, viscous and long-lived, it is one of the world's great historic dessert wines and carries its own protected designation of origin.