CYPRUS WINE MUSEUM
The Cyprus wine museum was established on the 16th of November in 2004 by Anastasia Guy in memory of her parents and in the museum you will find out about the wine in Cyprus on a journey through 5.500 years of wine making history.
All the villages of the island that produce wine and their wineries arc mostly concentrated in the region of Limassol and Pafos; and the four big industries of wine are here in Limassol - KEO. SODAP, ETKO and LOEL. Here in Cyprus you will find Commandaria, which is a local famous wine and is made out of two varieties of vines - the xynisteri and the local black. Mavro. It's a dark flavored wine with a very sweet taste, which through the years has become really famous. The first name people used for it was Nama, but since the Medieval age when the military headquarters of St. John where on the island, and more specific at the Kolossi castle it was renamed to Commandaria; the reason was that the headquarters of St. John were called La Grande Commanderie and they used to export this wine to Jerusalem and instead of saying "the wine the Grande Commandarie brought" they changed it into Commandaria. This wine. Commandaria, was also served at the wedding of Richard the Lionheart to Berengaria at the Kolossi castle when he conquered the island in 1191.
The position of the museum, here in the village of Erimi, is really important: as it's between the castle of Kolossi and the Kourium amphitheatre. Also the road from here leads up to the roots of Troodos Mountain where all the wine villages are. Another reason is because here in Erimi, back in 1933, Porfyrios Dikaios - who was an archaeologist - found some fragments from jars after excavation. But only until 2005 - a year after the opening of the museum- an Italian scientist found out. after experiments, that the flasks contained tartaric acid, which you can find in wine; and most probably Commandaria was the wine they used to store in it. When she put the pieces together she made a flask, which is similar to an amphora; the difference is the handles. The flask is much older than the amphora as it's dated in 3500 b.c. So in conclusion Commandaria has a history of over 5000 years and that Erimi is the origin of wine in the Mediterranean. To make Commandaria, people did the harvest in September when the grapes were mature, then let them in the sun for natural dehydration for several days and then put them in the press where they got the juice and transported it into big containers for the fermentation.
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