Commandaria Wine Region

Commandaria isn’t a town you visit — it’s a demarcated wine region of 14 villages strung across the south-facing Troodos foothills, roughly 30 to 45 minutes north of Limassol. The wine itself has a fair claim to being the oldest named wine in the world: the Knights of St John were making this sweet, sun-dried dessert wine here in the 12th century, ran it under the same protected name from 1192, and Richard the Lionheart is said to have toasted it at his Limassol wedding as “the wine of kings and the king of wines”. You taste it now from tiny family wineries that sun-dry Xynisteri and Mavro grapes, basket-press them, and age the result two-plus years in old oak.

The honest way to do it is as a self-drive half-day rather than a Bordeaux-style estate crawl. The wineries are small and several open only Thursday to Saturday — Karseras in Doros, which makes nothing but Commandaria from a €15 bottle to a €150 one, is the textbook example — so the trick is to confirm two or three working stops, link them through the prettiest villages, and not over-pack the day. Laneia is the one to linger in: an artists’ village of restored stone houses, open studios, an old olive press and a couple of proper Vakhis-scheme tavernas for lunch.

Tie the wine to its history by bolting on Kolossi Castle on the way in or out — the squat 15th-century keep 14km west of Limassol that the Knights ran as ‘La Grande Commanderie’, the headquarters that gave the wine its name. Entry is €2.50 and half an hour does it. You’ll want your own hire car for all of this: there’s no bus that strings the villages together, the roads are winding mountain lanes, and the only real catch is the obvious one — if you’re tasting, someone has to stay dry, or you let a guided tour from Limassol do the driving. Cyprus drives on the left, like the UK, which makes the hairpins far less daunting than they look.