The huge hornets, bright yellow and black striped minature helicopters, buzz around the huge black wooden vat outside the taverna. The air is thick with the smell of ripe fruit and the flowers in the pots that surround the car park area. The village atmosphere is one of happiness and celebration, hard work and old traditions that go back to ancient times. It has an earthy undercurrent of fertility rites and excitement recalled from the distant past. It is wine making time in the little village way up in the mountains. The same scene is being enacted in numerous villages throughout Corfu, and Greece.

Each taverna has its own tradition of wine making. They will all make it their own way, with their own preferred type of grapes, or mixture of different grapes to give the rose wine, rather than the white or red. Some of the wine is referred to as black, because of the particularly dark musky grape which is used which produces the dark red, richly fruity wine. The wine comes in all combinations, black, red, white, sweet, medium sweet, dry and very dry. Retsina is also made, a dry white wine which is matured in wooden casks (Usually Oak) which gives it a particularly woody flavour.

Spiros, the taverna owner, is busy making the wine. He learned how to make the wine from his mother and father, who founded the taverna in 1965. His father died years ago, but his mother is still here supervising the making of the wine for the taverna and the family. 

It is a matter of family pride that the wine is still as good as when his father made it all those years ago. 

The driver of the grape lorry stacks the crates of ripe red grapes high outside the taverna, ready for Spiros to use them. He is making the red wine today, which will be medium dry table wine when it is ready to drink around christmas this year.

Few of the tavernas or wine makers tread the grapes here by foot. It takes too long to crush enough grapes to make so much wine, and you have to be more careful about hygeine these days. Most use an electric crusher if they have a lot of wine to produce, if they only have a little to produce, for the family, they use a barrel with a screw press to crush the grapes. When they are not using the barrel press for the grapes, they use it to press their own olives to make olive oil for the family use.

Spiros is helped by two Albanian workers, who work hard to keep up with the grape crusher. They pass the baskets of ripe fruit up to Spiros, who is dropping them into the grape crusher. It is like a huge box, with big metal screws that turn against each other, crushing the grapes to mush. The huge wooden vat beneath them has only a little spring water in it, ready for the grape mush to drop into.

Spiros brings out some small clean glasses from the taverna, and gives everyone a glass of the juice from the first pressing of the wine grapes.

It is cloudy, deep red, and extremely sweet. The wine makers believe that it is lucky for all to drink from the first pressing, and the sweet grape juice gives everyone making the wine the energy needed to get the job finished.