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Olympus The Hadjipavlou family has been associated with wine more than any other group of people for they have systematically been dealing in wine since 1844 when the oldest winemaking business group in Cyprus (and one of the oldest in the whole of the Middle East) was established. The company, ETKO, had been doing great things until the end of the 1980’s, producing, for successive decades, thousands of tonnes of mainly bulk (unbottled) wine but also cheap, low quality bottled wine that easily found buyers in countries of the former Soviet bloc and mainly Russia. These markets were lost, due to competition from cheaper and better quality Italian and Spanish wines, leaving behind an immense gap that shook the wine industry in its totality, in an unprecedented manner. Short-sightedly, the Cyprus wine industry, with the state’s blessing, had for years been relying on flimsy foundations, chasing after quantity rather than quality. Such crises can bring about either death or regeneration.
It was the latter that occurred in the case of ETKO. In 1992 the newly built regional winery of Olympus came into being, evidence to the company’s inevitable decision to abandon the original winery and move within the grape-producing zone, in this case the traditional wine village of Omodos, with the main objective of gradually switching over to the production of higher quality wines.
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