How a Bike-Riding Importer Got a City to Drink Greek Wine

Theo Diamantis is the kind of person who gets recognized in small Greek villages. He's pretty famous there, because Oenopole—the Montreal agency he co-founded in 2006—is the biggest importer of Greek wine in Canada. In a small country like Greece, word travels.

We sat down with Diamantis to talk about the early days of Oenopole, why Montreal is arguably the best city in the world to drink wine, and how Greek wines have populated the shelves at SAQ.

You enrolled in the sommelier program at the ITHQ in 2005. When did Greek wine specifically become the mission?

We'd spent all this time on the classics: Bordeaux, Burgundy, Piedmont, and Tuscany. Then one day the teacher said, “okay, today we're going to cover Greece, Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Bulgaria.” All in three hours. And I'm like, what the fuck is this? Greece was the birthplace of serious winemaking. We had a god dedicated to it and it was being given half an hour. I thought, this is bullshit.

At the same time, all the Greek wine at the SAQ was industrial, conventional stuff. Meanwhile, I'd been spending summers in Greece my whole life, drinking these fantastic artisanal wines that nobody here had ever tasted. So I said, I'm going to start importing Greek wine.

How did you get started?

My first instinct was to approach the Greek restaurant community. Epic fail. They didn't see the value. Even though the wines were just a little more expensive than what was out there—$17, $20 a bottle—they felt there was no market here.

What saved me was going to non-Greek restaurants—Toqué!, L'Express, Leméac—where the reaction was completely different. I sold my allocations like that. Anybody who knew anything about wine immediately saw the value. Things took off from there.

You co-founded Oenopole in 2006. What were the first years actually like?

Painful. Beautiful, but painful. My partners Alexei and Aurelia and I weren't drawing salaries for the first five years. Aurelia and I were working nights in restaurants to keep things going. I was the sommelier at Milos, then Pullman, then Lalou, then Le Chien Fumant for many years. Meanwhile, we were building the agency in our living room.

And I was on a bike. I only learned to drive when I was fifty, so for the first eight years, I was the guy with his wine samples in a bag, on his bike, in the metro, going from restaurant to restaurant—pounding pavement.

Where does the logo found on the bottles come from?

I wanted to get away from the clichés—no grape clusters, no wine glasses. In the archives of the National Library in Athens, going through old books on the history of the Greek wine trade, I found a page showing seals that wine importers used over the centuries. One stopped me.

It was the seal of a Venetian wine merchant from the twelfth century importing Vinsanto from Santorini to the Pope. Vin Santo—Vino di Santorini—is a naturally sweet wine from sun-dried Assyrtiko grapes, the volcanic acidity cuts right through. And this merchant was shipping barrels to the Vatican. If you look closely at the logo, you can see the Catholic cross—those barrels were destined for the Pope. That became our sticker.