When my friend Nicole and I first arrived in New York, fresh out of a small-town college in southern Maine, we were eager to explore everything the big city had to offer. Happy hours with free food! Skyscrapers with rooftop pools! Waiters on roller skates at The Saloon on the Upper West Side! Huge lofts in Soho that artists lived and worked in!

It was the 1980s, the era of big hair, neon spandex leggings, and ‘super clubs’ like the Limelight, Danceteria and the Mud Club, where, as nightclub impresario Jim Fouratt says, “Everyone was free to be who they thought they were.”

But it was the food scene that was always first on our minds. As two small-town New Englanders, we were awed by the myriad of ethnic restaurants the Big Apple had to offer, including Indian (6th Street in the East Village), Japanese, Turkish, Spanish, Peruvian, Mexican (in the first three months alone we chipped and dipped our way through dozens of them), and Mediterranean, especially Greek—in those days hummus was exotic.

And while strong and salty-rimmed margaritas were our go-to drink, somehow we discovered retsina, probably due to its $3-a-bottle price tag, but also because it tasted so darned good with that hummus. I’m sure these were the worst, mass-produced examples of the wine (back then I think that’s all you could get), but right from that first glass, I fell in love with that piney aroma—like the smell of the forest in those Maine woods—and how great it tasted with food.

Nicole, on the other hand, took her time warming up to it. “My first experience with retsina was that it tasted like rubbing alcohol or perhaps lighter fluid,” she recalls. “But it became an acquired taste because it paired so well with Greek salads piled high with feta cheese and stuffed grape leaves.”

For Grape Collective, I spoke with several Greek wine producers who are making a more refined style of retsina; made with carefully grown grapes, a very small amount of the finest resin, and with modern winemaking techniques. Read the full article here.