The Table
We have spent enough harvests on Santorini to know that the island tasted of inspectors long before any inspector arrived. In December 2025, Michelin confirmed it would extend its Greek selection beyond Athens for the first time, adding Santorini and Thessaloniki, with the full slate revealed in the second half of 2026. Before the stars drop, it is worth standing in the vineyard that explains everything.
The vines here grow as nowhere else: woven by hand into low ground-hugging baskets the islanders call kouloura, a wreath that traps what little humidity the wind allows and shields the fruit from the meltemi. The volcanic soil of ash, pumice and lava is hostile to phylloxera, the louse that flattened Europe's vineyards in the nineteenth century. It never breached Santorini, so the rootstock here runs ungrafted, the vines coiled over roots that producers describe as among the oldest still in production.
The wine is Assyrtiko. The PDO Santorini zone, established in 1971, requires a minimum of 85 per cent Assyrtiko, the balance Athiri and Aidani; many estates bottle it at 100. It reads like seawater struck against flint, an acidity that survives the heat because the grape, improbably, keeps its bite as the sugars climb. The barrel-aged, higher-alcohol expression carries its own name, Nykteri, by tradition at least 13.5 per cent.
A wine that tastes of stone because the stone gave it nothing else.
Then the plate. Fava Santorinis, the golden purée pressed from Lathyrus clymenum, a yellow split pea cultivated on this volcanic ground for millennia; the EU granted it PDO status in 2010. It arrives warm, dressed with raw onion and the island's brined capers, the caper bush clinging to terraces no vine would tolerate. Eat it beside a glass of Assyrtiko and the argument makes itself.
This is the quiet worry. A star changes the arithmetic of an island that already strains under its own popularity, and the danger is that recognition tilts the table toward the visitor rather than the vine. We would rather Santorini be understood for what it grows in spite of itself: a cuisine of scarcity, mineral and exact. Taste it now, before the badge does the talking.