The winery is pretty much the worst one we visited in the last year (we visited around 20 at least). When we were there the people did not speak English but tried to help nevertheless. The wine was hastily served with some bread in olive oil and olives. The same glass was used for all the wines (lucky we had some water with us to rinse of the glass). The winery also sells tourists souvenirs and even polish vodka (for 30 euro’s!!!).

None of the wines have a proper label (e.g. year missing, grapes used missing) and all the wines were pretty bad. The wines lack a decent scent. In the semi-sweet wine we tasted added sugar (it has a distinct taste) and we suspected the wine is actually the same as the dry white (same for the semi-sweet rose and red). In other wineries the wine makers explained that Cyrpus wines are typically dry wines because of the soil and climate. The 1.5 liter bottle of 10 year old wine (priced at 30 Euro’s) even lacks a production year and is not better than any of the other wines. The port was reasonable and the Zivania (Cyprus traditional grape distilled drink, snapps like) was okay. The Zivania did not have any label on the bottle at all.

Honest to say: we tasted the wines keeping the price of 10 Euro a bottle in our minds. If it would have been served as a cheap table wine (3 euro for ½ caraf) in a small restaurant we would probably have been okay with it.

The wine cellar is a little cave with a few holes and bottles but there is no decent cellar with wooden barrels or so. The wine making facility is actually not shown and on the labels of the wines there is a text saying: “Produced and Bottled for Sterna Winery” suggesting that the wine is not produced there in the first place.

Please note that the location on the Sterna winery website is not correct. The location shows that it is IN Kathikas but in fact it is located 2 km east of the town (paved road).

The trip was quite nice we took bus (648) from Polis to Kathikas (4 busses a day). Also see: CyprusByBus. It is an easy 1,2 km walk to the Vasilikon winery  and from there you can easily walk the 3 km to Sterna and then over and around the Hills (unpaved roads) to Giolou and take bus 645 back to Polis (every hour). Please note that google
maps does not show the trails but Bing maps does provide the trails (see picture).