When going to a wine tasting you wouldn't think that anything about it is artistic. However, the G. Koutsoyannopoulos Winery in Santorini is also a museum. The museum is located in a cellar eight meters underground that takes you through a timeline of the beginning of wine and what the production process is. It is a self-guided tour so they give you a headset where you enter the number of the exhibit you are at and it will give you detailed information about what they're doing.
Just to give a little background, the winery was founded in 1870 by the Koutsoyannopoulos brothers, Grigoris and Dimitris. The production process starts by them picking the grapes during harvest season. In Santorini, the harvest begins a little earlier than it would anywhere else because that is when the grapes are ripe due to the heat and lack of water.
After the harvest, the grapes were carried by the donkeys. They would take these grapes somewhere where they would weigh the grapes and then crush them. The balance that they used to weigh the grapes was portable and easy to use because it wasn't very heavy.
This is how they would weigh the grapes
Just to give a little information on how the harvesting process works, they would crush the grapes by stepping on them with their bare feet. They would do this at night because it is cooler than it would be during the day. Something that I found very interesting is that harvest was the only time of the year that the girls could leave the house with their fathers permission so they could help, and it was then that they might meet the person that they will marry. After they crushed the grapes, they would start the bottling process and soon you would have wine.
There were many artistic elements in this museum, such as how they recreated the scenes and showed exactly what was happening and then explained it. This made it more interesting because you really knew what you were looking at it and you weren't just looking at it and trying to guess what you are seeing. I loved that this was the way that they decided to do this museum. I love how realistic the people looked in each scene, they were very lifelike.
Some of the bottles they would store the wine in
