Sun-ripened tomatoes, aubergine, fish straight out of the sea, lamb, fruits - melons, lemons, figs - and vine leaves. If you think of Greece, these are the food images which evoke the country in an instant.

Of course, they represent the nation's summer harvest rather than its winter staples, but as in all Mediterranean countries its true taste lies in the seasons, and most of us are more familiar with its summer crops than its winter produce. For that, blame the summer tourist industry.

With summer upon us and the Athens Olympics kicking off tomorrow, we asked Greek exile Theodore Kyriakou, chef-proprietor of London's Real Greek and two Real Greek Souvlaki & Bar restaurants, for a food short cut to the land of the gods.

"It is my belief," he says in the introduction to his new book - from which these traditional dishes are taken - "that recipes can be the most wonderful shorthand for a ense of place; they can be so deeply ingrained it becomes more like an instinct; and they can speak for the accumulated wisdom of generations."

The Greek vine
I'll always remember my first good bottle of Greek wine. And it wasn't in Greece. I found it on the shelves of my local Oddbins, which prided itself on sourcing good wines from obscure regions. Not that Greece is obscure, just good wine from Greece. Most people's contact with its vinous offerings came in the form of retsina, white wine with small pieces of pine resin added to the must and left with the wine until the first racking. I like it, actually. You know where you are - on a Greek island, preferably, at a taverna on the beach, with an oregano-scented Greek salad in front of you.

But Greek wine has come a long way in the last few years (Greece, too, come to that, with its chic boutique hotels and funky bars) with the Greeks themselves demanding higher standards.

There's a new generation of winemakers who have studied and travelled the globe, and are now setting up their own wineries or applying their new-found knowledge to larger companies, introducing exotic techniques such as micro-oxygenation and reverse osmosis. Mix it up with the latest hi-tech winemaking kit and you've got wines that are starting to show some real character.

And they've got grape varieties galore with character. Greece boasts several stunning indigenous grape varieties, as well as plantings of international varietals. Some of their own include the likes of Assyrtiko, one of the country's finest white varieties that rules the roost in Santorini's volcanic soils, producing wines that show both minerality and body; or there's Robola, the most important grape of the Ionian islands, also grown in the Peloponnese and central Greece and noted, when harvested late, for its ability to produce powerful, rich, alcoholic wines; or Savatiano, Greece's most widely planted grape that for decades has been associated with the production of retsina, but carefully grown can yield powerful, dense, aromatic white wines.

On the red front there's tongue-twister Aghiorgitiko (though they're all a challenge when you've had a few), the mainstay of major appellation Nemea, producing a huge variety of styles from light, nondescript reds to brooding, tannic monsters; and the equally unpronounceable Xinomavro, king of the red grapes in northern Greece and a major component in other appellations - think Nebbiolo; and meet the muscle-packed Limnio, which plays a part in Greece's swanky Bordeaux-style blends, planted in the north mainland of Greece and on the island of Lemnos, and mentioned by classical Greek poet Hesiod.

I should point out here that the Greeks have been making wine for more than 4,000 years, lest you think they're new at this game. They even have a legitimate claim to the development of wine culture, but it's only now that it's beginning to show its true potential. Its future lies with these better indigenous varieties and it offers the consumer - and the restaurant-goer - something new, with a real sense of place.

Are you listening Chardonnay and Cabernet? Go Greek.

Fiona Sims