The terroir-obsessed Californian winemaker Randall Grahm once described tasting a Riesling from Alsace (the Muenchberg of André Ostertag) as being akin to "shaking the hand of a mountain". Dry white wine from the Greek island of Santorini enables the curious drinker to go one notch further. In its bizarre yet beautiful combination of lemon, salt, sulphur and crushed pumice, you can taste the most forceful volcanic eruption of the past 10,000 years of Earth's geological history. At some time around 1614BC, Santorini's undersea volcano exploded with greater power than did Krakatoa in 1883, unleashing a chain of Mediterranean tsunamis, remodelling the island's own landmass, and causing a multi-season volcanic winter felt as far away as China. If Santorini's white wine tastes like no other on earth, that venting of the planet's innards is the principal reason.

What passes for soil on this 73-sq-km Cycladic island, which lies 63 nautical miles north of Crete and 127 from Piraeus, is a juvenile muddle of pumice, ash and lava. This ill-mixed detritus makes a singular growing medium, rendered still more challenging by the fierce, rainless summers and the savage winds. A surprisingly large number of varieties have adapted themselves to these conditions but the greatest is Assyrtiko, whose ability to maintain its acidity as it ripens is almost shocking. The wind, paradoxically, may help. To prevent the vines being blown into the Aegean, they are grown in a scrape in the ground. The canes are trained in a circular manner, eventually being woven (by the gnarled pensioners who tend them) into an intertwined basket that sits, hunched like a small oil drum, against the elements. The bunches of grapes lounge amid a tangle of cane and leaf. The result of such shading would be catastrophic in Bordeaux. Here it helps.