The Cyprus Wine Museum, in an old Erimi inn

Wine museums are often an excuse to sell bottles, and this one sells too, but it has a story that sets it apart. It’s housed in a stone inn in Erimi where, according to the museum, wine merchants from the Limassol and Paphos villages stopped overnight on their way to market. I’m going on the museum’s own website, which is the only source with opening hours and prices. For the bigger picture of wine on the island, see Cypriot wine.

A merchants’ inn

The museum opened in November 2004 after six years of work, from 1998 to 2004, restoring and extending a stone building of about 150 years. Its founder, Anastasia Guy, explains that the house had been in her family for generations and that she chose it as a tribute to the island’s wine history. Thanks to its spot on the old Limassol to Paphos road, beside the Kouris river and a few minutes from Kolossi Castle, it describes itself as sitting at the crossroads of the Cyprus wine routes.

Erimi also has an archaeological card to play. The archaeologist Porfyrios Dikaios dug a Chalcolithic settlement here in the 1930s, and chemical analysis of its pointed-base flasks, carried out this century, detected wine residues around 5,500 years old, as the Paphos tourism board relates. The museum uses that find to present the village as the birthplace of European wine.

What is there to see at the Cyprus Wine Museum?

The displays run by period. An ancient room explains how the Greeks drank their wine, always watered down except the first cup, offered to Dionysos. The Roman and Byzantine room recalls the mosaics of the House of Dionysos in Paphos and wine’s place in the Orthodox liturgy. The medieval room focuses on the Crusaders and Commandaria, with a copy of a 1903 mural from the Royal Exchange in London showing the Banquet of the Five Kings of 1363, when Peter I of Cyprus visited the city. According to the museum, Commandaria was served at that table, which will raise a smile with London visitors.

The 19th and 20th century room is the one I find most rewarding. It brings together vineyard and cellar tools, 20th-century household glassware, the Lania wine press with its great beam and stone counterweight, a grape crusher, huge storage jars from Kornos and Foini built by hand layer by layer over forty days, and the stills used for zivania. Downstairs is the St Hilarion Hall, with the tasting room and a display on the Cyprus wine routes.

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Tickets, hours and visits

It’s open daily from 10:00 to 17:00, except Sundays in August, 13 to 15 August and public holidays. Entry alone is €5, with a glass of wine or Commandaria €10, and with the full tasting €15, which covers four house wines, a Commandaria, three zivanias and a small platter. Children pay €2, or €3 with a grape juice, and under-18s must be accompanied. Groups of eight or more adults book separately. The museum warns that prices and hours can change without notice, so I’d check the day before.

It has run school programmes since 2005 and hosts concerts with its own ensemble, the Commandaria Orchestra.

Getting there

It’s on the old B6 road between Limassol and Paphos, where the Knights’ street turns off towards Kolossi Castle and the road continues to the ancient town of Kourion and the Sanctuary of Apollo Hylates, according to the museum’s directions. By car it’s about ten minutes from the centre of Limassol. There’s a bus stop named after the museum on Pafos Street in Erimi, shown on OpenStreetMap, though I’d check the current route and timetable on the Limassol bus operator’s site before relying on it.

So you do not lose the morning at the ticket office, browse tickets and tours in Cyprus Wine Museum on GetYourGuide.

How to combine it

I’d pair it with Kolossi Castle, which makes complete sense given the Commandaria link, and with Kourion, further along the same road towards Paphos. The museum bills itself as the starting point of the Cyprus wine routes and suggests visiting it as part of the Krasochoria and Commandaria village routes. Heading inland, you reach the Limassol wine villages. The whole area is covered in Limassol district.

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If you are staying the night, see the best hotel deals in Limassol for your dates: the well-placed rooms go fast.