Beneath the building on the lip of the Fira caldera that Santorini had long known as the Sphinx, a stone chamber had been sitting shut. Rizes found it in the winter of 2024, while the premises were being worked on for a restaurant that had not yet opened. Inside were dozens of aged bottles — from the island, from the Greek mainland, from vineyards abroad — all of them intact. In the summer of 2025 the room opened as a cellar in its own right: Greek and international labels, and a table laid for 4.
What was found
The discovery was incidental, which is much of its interest. The address stands opposite the Metropolitan Cathedral of Fira, on the caldera’s edge, and the work under way was renovation rather than excavation. The cellar beneath came to light in the course of it — untouched for decades, and holding a collection that had been left where it was laid down. A record, in other words, of what the island had been drinking and keeping, and what it had thought worth putting away.
Rizes did not clear it out. The room was restored and the collection built outward from what was already in it, which is why the cellar reads as a continuation rather than a fit-out. The restaurant itself opened in Fira in June 2025 under Alexandros Makropoulos, its executive chef and co-owner, in partnership with the Aestian Group; Maria Sylla holds the kitchen as head chef.
The island, stated plainly
At the centre of what the cellar now holds are Vinsanto and Nykteri — the two wines in which Santorini says most plainly what it is. The bottles come from Argyros, Sigalas, Hatzidakis and Karamolegos, four houses that work the same volcanic ground to four different ends, and whose presence together is the nearest thing the island has to a statement of position.
That is the part of the collection a visitor is least likely to have met elsewhere. Santorini’s wines travel, but they travel young; a cellar that has held them for years, on the island that made them, is a different proposition from a list, however good the list.
Beyond the caldera
The collection does not stop at the water. Gerovasileiou, Alpha Estate and Hatzimichalis carry the Greek mainland, between them covering most of what has changed in Greek wine over the past few decades. Beyond that the cellar turns outward again — aged Bordeaux, Italian and Spanish labels, and further French bottles besides, alongside vintage Dom Pérignon and Armand de Brignac.
It is an unusual shape for an island cellar, and the shape is the point. A room that begins with Nykteri and ends with a vintage champagne invites a comparison that neither bottle makes on its own.
A table for 4
The cellar is not a display. It seats 4, and it is used: the Private Cellar Dinner takes a table of that size into the stone room by candlelight for a tasting menu paired from the collection itself. Alongside it runs a heritage tasting of Greek wine and olive oil, which walks the same ground more slowly.
Four covers is a deliberate number. It rules out the private dining room in all but name — the group large enough to become an occasion in itself — and leaves what the room is actually suited to, which is a small party, a long evening, and a sommelier with the time to open the bottles in an order that means something.
Santorini has no shortage of tables with a view of the caldera. It has very few rooms where the view is irrelevant, and this is one: below ground, lit by candles, with nothing to look at but what the island has kept.
The house makes the introduction, for those who ask.
