Fall Harvest Season Highlights: Basket Vines, Underground Cellars, Sweden’s October Pick (and more)

From volcanic vineyards in Santorini to a restored castle estate in southern Sweden and a barrel cellar in the Luberon, harvest season is the moment the wine world becomes worth traveling for — and in this edition, AMPR looks at the places worth the trip.

THE VINES THAT GROW IN BASKETS

Santorini’s vines are trained into kouloura — low, coiled baskets woven from the plant’s own canes, with the fruit sheltered inside the nest against the meltemi wind, catching overnight sea fog as the vineyard’s only irrigation. Many are ungrafted and generations old, rooted in pumice and volcanic ash that phylloxera never colonized; picking began in the first days of August, entirely by hand, one basket at a time. What comes out is Assyrtiko: severe, saline, structured to age — and its most complete showcase is now in Athens, where Hotel Grande Bretagne Head Sommelier and Wine Director Evangelos Psofidis has assembled more than 120 labels of the variety, from Santorini, Tinos, Naxos, Paros, Crete and the mainland.

THE HOTEL NAMED FOR THE HARVEST

Vedema, a Luxury Collection Resort, takes its name from the Venetian word for harvest and was built on the ground where Megalochori’s wine was actually made — a series of underground cellars bordered by the village on one side and vineyards on the other. Antonis Eliopoulos, Santorini’s gentleman vintner, turned his family’s summer estate into hand-crafted villas built over and around those cellars rather than clearing them, giving each a new life below: a medieval-feeling restaurant, a private dining room for two, an art gallery and a tasting room where tastings are held at dusk daily through the summer. He bottled a maiden vintage in 1995 with the cooperative’s chief winemaker, Christoforos Karamolegos, and today the harvest from the estate’s seven hectares goes to that cooperative, which produces an exemplary Assyrtiko under the Vedema name.

HARVEST MOVES NORTH: SKÅNE PICKS IN OCTOBER

Two months after Santorini finishes, Sweden begins. Skåne, the country’s southern tip, has become one of Northern Europe’s most closely watched emerging regions, helped by limestone-rich soils that invite comparison with Champagne and Burgundy, that ripen into October. The wines are lean, high-acid and unmistakably northern; the community making them is small, young and increasingly decorated. At its center is Maryhill Estate in Glumslöv, the restored 1918 Örenäs Castle, where Mary’s Vineyard sits in one of Scandinavia’s most striking landscapes and the estate’s own sommelier leads private cellar tours and tastings, with a dedicated Wine Week running 25 October–1 November. Its Hill House restaurant was recently recognized with a Best of Award of Excellence in the Wine Spectator Restaurant Awards — a first-order signal that the Nordic wine conversation is worth the trip.

PROVENCE: WALKING THE ROWS

In the Luberon, Domaine de la Coquillade farms 20 hectares of hillside vineyard organically, producing AOP Ventoux from Grenache, Syrah, Marsanne and Roussanne across three cuvées — Coquillade, Elyo and PURE. What makes it worth the detour in harvest season is that the estate has built its visitor program around the vineyard itself rather than the tasting counter: the Sentier Vigneron, a 90-minute guided walk through the rows, and a Signature Estate Experience that runs the walk into the barrel cellar and a full tasting.