This Deserted Vineyard on Greece’s Peloponnese Peninsula Is Now a Luxurious Resort

Many resorts in Greece are vivid white and curved, their easy shapes dotting the panorama like dollops of whipped cream. Not Dexamenes Seaside Lodge, which was constructed from a former wine manufacturing facility and opened in 2019 on the wild coast of the Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece. Its traces are industrial and angular, the colours rusty hues that think of grape-juice stains. The resort’s aesthetic is a completely novel method to Greek hospitality — and pays homage to the nation’s lengthy wine-making historical past. 

“The manufacturing facility was as soon as crucial for the native economic system,” stated Nikos Karaflos, the proprietor and supervisor of Dexamenes. “I used to be born on this space — I need to protect the tradition and historical past of this place.”

Greece’s Peloponnese area skilled a increase in wine manufacturing beginning within the 1860s, when the business in France collapsed due to a phylloxera epidemic. However because the French vineyards recovered within the early twentieth century and Greece suffered from an unstable agricultural market, the promising Greek business faltered. By the early Nineteen Eighties, the Dexamenes manufacturing facility had fallen out of use. 

In 2003, Karaflos and his household bought the positioning, and in 2013 he partnered with the Athens-based structure agency Okay-Studios to plan the renovation. The timing was serendipitous: after many years of manufacturing mediocre wines, Greece’s business was kicking into severe gear. Since then, Greek varietals, just like the white assyrtiko and crimson agiorgitiko, have made a comeback. 

The very first thing you see while you enter the grounds of Dexamenes are two monumental silos within the heart of a reflecting pool. These constructions have been as soon as used to retailer grape should; now, with their roofs eliminated so the celebs twinkle overhead, they function areas for personal dinners, wine tastings, wellness occasions, and artwork installations. (A couple of summers in the past, the resort held a tasting accompanied by a modern-dance efficiency within the pool.) 

The 34 rooms, referred to as WineTank suites, are housed inside concrete vats as soon as used for fermentation; every one has clear traces and minimal décor, with the pipes that when channeled the wine nonetheless seen. (There are additionally two bigger lodging, the Sea View ChemLab suites.) Do you have to overindulge at lunch or dinner, you’ll simply go to sleep on the natural-fiber mattresses — or perk up in a walk-in rain bathe. 

For the complete bottle record, which has a particular concentrate on Peloponnesian wines and a complete part dedicated to pure and biodynamic Greek bottlings, dine at dex.Machina restaurant, positioned contained in the vineyard’s former manufacturing heart. As for the wines from the unique Dexamenes manufacturing facility? Karaflos and his household lastly completed the final of them final 12 months. There are new Greek wines to save lots of for the future. 

A model of this story first appeared within the October 2023 problem of Journey + Leisure beneath the headline “Perform and Design.”