Mavro

Mavro is the most planted grape on Cyprus and one of the oldest continuously cultivated vines in the Mediterranean. Its name simply means black in Greek, which tells you how long it has been the default red of the island: it needed no other name, because for most of its history there was nothing to distinguish it from.

Cyprus was never touched by phylloxera, so the vines there are ungrafted and some plots are very old. That fact is more interesting than the wine usually is. Mavro crops heavily, ripens to moderate sugar and gives a pale, soft, low acid red with light red fruit and very little tannin, and much of the crop historically went to the industrial production of cheap sherry style wine for export.

Its serious role is in Commandaria, the sweet wine of the Troodos foothills that is one of the oldest named wines still in production. Mavro and the white Xynisteri are sun dried on mats after picking, fermented, and often fortified, then aged for years. The grape's low acidity matters less when the sugar and the oxidative ageing carry the wine.