(Wine-Searcher) - Salty, briny and tasting of seashells – not your usual wine descriptors, but Santorini is no ordinary region.

So what is the big deal about Santorini?

If you want to taste terroir, there's no better wine on earth. For more than 3000 years, native grape varieties have been growing on this beautiful Mediterranean island, the vines trained into a unique basket shape close to the ground, to protect them from the bright sun, wind and salty air. Nobody noticed the wines until 25 years ago. Today's Santorini wines combine the viticultural wisdom of the Phoenicians with modern winemaking, for flavors that never existed anywhere else.

Terroir, schmerroir. Are you gonna give me that mystical bullshit about the wine tasting like the local dirt?

Well, yes.

"With Santorini Assyrtico, you're tasting that island," says Michael Madrigale, sommelier at Bar Boulud in New York. "The great wines are those where the vines have adapted and mutated in that region. You're tasting the soil. You're tasting the years and years of sunlight and salty sea air that the vines had to withstand in order to produce fruit."

And it really tastes like it. These are salty wines, like the salty wind that blows in from the sea, and they're minerally wines, like the dry, beach-like, sandy soils that cover the islands. Now I grant you that you don't expect to taste citrus in the sand, but Eric Asimov wrote in the New York Times that Santorini wines "show pure briny, mineral flavors, as if they were the concentrated essence of millions of tiny seashells."

Sip a Santorini wine and it's not hard to imagine yourself lying facedown on the beach.

Is Assyrtico the only grape grown there?

There are actually 35 native grape varieties on Santorini, but Assyrtico makes up 70 percent of plantings for good reason. It's not only the best grape on the island – Boutari enologist Yannis Voyatzis thinks it's the best grape in Greece. It's increasingly being planted on the Greek mainland with good results. Sometimes in Santorini it's blended with Aidani, which is more aromatic, and Athiri.

How good are these wines, really?

It's fair to say they're the best white wines in Greece. In 2013, Asimov convened a tasting of Greek whites and said the panel found a "wonderful trove of wines that can be stimulating, even riveting, and rarely boring". The wines came from all over Greece, but Asimov wrote: "Our three favorite wines were all Santorini Assyrticos, as were six of our top 10, which is particularly impressive because only seven Santorini Assyrticos were in the tasting, and the seventh just missed the cut."

As for how they compare to non-Greek wines, Bar Boulud's list is "dedicated to the great wines of the Rhône Valley and Burgundy", but Madrigale recently included a Santorini wine from Argyros in his "Great Whites of Europe" flight, along with an Austrian Grüner Veltliner and a white Burgundy.

"I think of (Santorini whites) as one of the classic wines of the world," Madrigale says. "These wines are made in somewhat of a clinical sense, where there's just stainless steel. You don't have to use barrels to bring out the best of the terroir. There's nothing added, no oak, no oxidation. The wines just spring from the glass with character."

Why did it take the world so long to discover them?

Until 25 years ago, they weren't very good. There are 1200 grapegrowers on Santorini, out of 6000 permanent residents, and they traditionally harvested in a festival at the end of September, creating boozy, oxidized wines. Boutari, one of the first Greek companies to make serious table wines, established a winery in 1989 in Santorini, and enologist Voyatzis insisted on harvesting a month earlier. Growers rioted, turning off Boutari's power and bursting open some tanks. But that happened only the first year because once people tasted the wines, they realized Voyatzis was right.

1200 grapegrowers? There must be a confusing riot of wine choices, right?

Actually, there are only 10 wineries on Santorini. You easily visit every single winery in just two days. I once did it in five, and it was one of the greatest weeks I've ever spent in wine country. Santorini is a wonderful place – great seafood, beautiful views, and terrific wine every night. A big advantage of the small winery community is that the wines are pretty consistent from winery to winery. You know what you're getting when it says Santorini on the bottle.

But who are the best wineries?

Domaine Sigalas is one of the most exacting. Paris Sigalas founded the winery in 1991, right after tasting what Boutari could do with the grapes, and he still makes precise, balanced wines.

Argyros is a family winery founded in 1903, with fourth-generation vintner Matthew Argyros in charge. This is a popular choice with sommeliers in part because of the family history in a place where so many wineries are new. That said, Argyros wines were among my favorites in tasting the 2014 vintage, and a 2011 Argyros wine won the Times' panel tasting in 2013.