The Role of the Ezousa River
The winery took its name from the river. Very little about the way we farm is unrelated to it.
Where it comes from
The Ezousa runs about forty-one kilometres, which makes it the sixth-longest river on the island. It rises on the northern slopes of the Troodos at the Tripylos massif, east of the Stavros tis Psokas forest station, turns south through the valley that carries its name, passes Episkopi, Kallepeia and Tsada, and reaches the sea near Acheleia, beside Paphos airport.
Our vineyards sit on the hilltops above it, at Kannaviou.
What a river does for a vineyard
Two things, mostly. It holds humidity in a landscape that is otherwise very dry in summer, which keeps the vines from shutting down in the worst of the heat. And it gives the cool night air somewhere to run: air drains down the valley after dark, and the gap between a hot afternoon and a cold night is what lets the grapes hold their acidity while the sugars come up.
That gap is not a detail. It is the reason a white grape can be grown for freshness at this latitude at all.
The dam
Above the village the river is held by the Kannaviou dam, a concrete-face rockfill dam completed in the middle of the 2000s, holding something in the order of eighteen million cubic metres. It supplies the region and irrigates a good deal of the land below it.
A protected valley
The valley and the cliffs along it are part of the Natura 2000 network — Koilada Ezousas for the birds, Kremmoi Ezousas for the cliffs and the valley floor — and the valley is recognised as an Important Bird Area. That is not a decoration. It sets limits on what may be done here, and we farm inside them.
The frog on our label
The Cyprus water frog, Pelophylax cypriensis, was only recognised as a species in its own right in 2012. It lives nowhere else on earth. It is densest in the Troodos, the most humid ground on the island, and has been recorded up to seventeen hundred metres. The IUCN lists it as vulnerable.
An amphibian breathes partly through its skin and breeds in standing water, which makes it a poor liar about the state of that water. Where the frogs are loud, the river is well. That is why one is on our bottles, and it is the reason we are careful about what we let run back into the ground.
Back to the journal