The most planted grape on the island, and almost nobody makes it properly.
Mavro means black. It covers around seventy per cent of Cyprus’s vines, it still grows on its own roots, and it has spent a century being asked to do the wrong job.
- GrapeMavro
- GrowerTsiakkas
- PlacePelendri, Pitsilia · Cyprus
- Organic since1995
If you think Cypriot red is rough, you have good evidence.
Most people’s experience of Mavro is a jug of something dark and tired at a taverna, or a bottle bought for the label rather than the contents. That is a real memory and we are not going to argue with it.
The grape is not the problem. Mavro was planted everywhere because it survives heat and gives a lot of fruit, and for most of the last century that is exactly what was wanted from it: volume.
Ask for a glass before you commit to a bottle. If it does not change your mind, we will pour you something else and nobody will mention it again.
A grape that never had to be rescued, because it never left.
Mavro is Cyprus’s own red grape and has been here a very long time — an Italian ampelographer catalogued it in 1877 as Cipro Nero, Cyprus black.
It covers roughly seventy per cent of the island’s cultivated vines. Nothing else in Europe is that dominant in its own country.
And here is the part that ought to be more famous: it still grows on its own roots. Phylloxera, the louse that destroyed almost every vineyard in Europe in the nineteenth century and forced the entire continent onto grafted American rootstock, never reached Cyprus. These vines are ungrafted, the way all vines used to be.
What matters then is where it is grown and what is asked of it. From high sites — Pitsilia among the few named for this — and with careful winemaking, Mavro stops being pale and thin and turns into a balanced red with real body. Tsiakkas is in Pitsilia. That is the whole story of this bottle.
A red that behaves like a local should.
It is medium-bodied, savoury, a little dusty, and not trying to impress you. Serve it slightly cool.
It goes with the obvious things — sausage, mushrooms, anything roasted — but the reason to order it is less about the match and more about the coincidence: a Cypriot red, in Cyprus, next to a pizza made by a Neapolitan.
If you are eating here with people visiting the island, this is the bottle to put in front of them.
Ungrafted Cypriot vines, next to a volcano and an Austrian cow farm.
The shelf holds wine from a live volcano in Sicily, a biodynamic farm in Austria, the foot of the Andes, and the north of Greece.
And then this: the grape that was already here, growing on roots that never had to be replaced, from a village an hour and a half up the mountain. It is the least travelled thing we pour and, on any given evening, the one most worth explaining.
Come and give it one glass.
One glass is all it takes to know. If you have written off Cypriot red, this is the cheapest possible way to find out whether you were right. We stop at a hundred pizzas a day — the earlier you come, the better your chances.
The things people actually ask.
Q.What is Mavro?
Mavro is the indigenous red grape of Cyprus and the island’s most widely planted variety, accounting for roughly 70% of cultivated vines. The name means "black" in Greek. It is used both for dry red wine and, blended with Xynisteri, for the dessert wine Commandaria.
Q.Why are Cypriot vines ungrafted?
Cyprus escaped the phylloxera epidemic that destroyed most European vineyards in the nineteenth century and forced growers across the continent to graft their vines onto resistant American rootstock. Cypriot vines, including Mavro, therefore still grow on their own roots.
Q.Is Mavro a good wine grape?
Handled for volume in hot lowland sites, Mavro gives pale, lightly astringent wine with modest aroma, which is how most people encounter it. Grown at altitude in areas such as Pitsilia and vinified carefully, it produces balanced red wine with fuller colour and body that can be kept for a few years.
Q.Where can I drink Cypriot red wine in Larnaca?
Filomena Pizzeria Napoletana, at 1 Aristotelous in Larnaca, Cyprus, pours Moukos, a dry red made from the indigenous Mavro grape by the organic Tsiakkas winery in the Troodos mountains, alongside Neapolitan pizza. It is open Tuesday to Sunday, 6pm to 10pm.