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This wine came from the region of Podravja, and the actual grape is the Laski Rizling—the Germans were outraged at the theft of the name of their revered grape, and forced the Slovenians to change it and use its proper name. The grape must (juice) was fermented at the winery, shipped in bulk to Ljubljana, substantially sweetened with unfermented grape juice (süssreserve) and perhaps some extra sugar, fortified with sulfur to keep it from going off, shipped in tankers to the London docks, stored, and bottled as needed. Britain became awash with medium-sweet white wine. It went down easily, it was cheap, and it gave an added touch of sophistication to many British house holds. Everyone needs a starter wine—few are born preferring a grand cru claret or an acidic muscadet—and for many Britons, Lutomer provided it. Most went on to develop a taste for dryer wines. But there was one regrettable result, which was that a liking for sweet white wines, whatever the quality, is now often perceived as the mark of a person who lacks sophistication, and who certainly knows nothing about wine (except that she knows what she likes).

Does the wine of Antipaxos exist?

H. G. WELLS wrote a story called “The Magic Shop” that is centered upon, not surprisingly, a magic shop. His narrator finds it on London’s Regent Street, although “I had fancied it was down nearer the Circus, or round the corner in Oxford Street, or even in Holborn; always over the way and a little inaccessible it had been, with something of the mirage in its position.”

There are wines like that, and perhaps the wine most like that is the fabled wine of Antipaxos. Trawl the Internet, rummage through the books, and you will find numerous references to it … but all of them different, always over the way and a little inaccessible. Some say it is light and white and fragrant, others that it is rich and red; some say you will occasionally find it for sale, others that it is never sold, but kept—it is made in tiny quantities, of course—for the families who make it. Occasionally a writer who has fallen under the spell will recount the tale of a taverna owner who takes a particular liking to him or her (“I felt that Tassos and I had become firm friends”) and produces an unlabeled bottle from some secret recess that transports them into a strange and hazily contemplative mood as they stumble home through the olive groves …

Well, Antipaxos itself exists, for sure, a mile or so south of the tiny Ionian island of Paxos. Paxos itself is an odd place: legend has it that a ship, piloted by one Thamus, was sailing from Italy to Greece, and as it passed the Paxos shoreline, a voice cried out, “Thamus, when you get to Palodes, be sure to proclaim that the great god Pan is dead.”

And Antipaxos is a mere speck in comparison. But we have had the Antipaxos wine and can solve the mystery. The wine of Antipaxos is a slightly sweet, quite heavy white wine, light red in color, a bit like a Beaujolais; it’s notably heavy and alcoholic, quite chewy with tannin, while at the same time being dry and amber-yellow with a hint of eucalyptus and honey, dark, almost black, and heavily fruited with blackcurrant and raspberry.

In other words, it’s any number of things. Each time, one is told that this is the genuine, the only Antipaxos wine, whether it’s on sale in the bakery in Gaios, the tiny capital of the island, or produced by a local from the depths of his olive-oil ware house in a plastic gas can, or materialized from the cellar of a Lakka taverna in an unlabeled bottle, or however it comes.

It is, in short, a mystery. For the wine bluffer, this is a godsend. If anyone speaks of the mysterious Antipaxos, you can simply say, “I know it well,” and describe anything that comes into your head, secure in the knowledge that, at some time or other, someone will have drunk something called Antipaxos that is exactly as you have described. It is indeed a veritable Proteus of wines, a shape-shifter, an elusive reminder that some things are