Look for wine, find a ruin

Greek wine is not well known in the US (probably because they have poor marketing departments which think that calling it "my big fat Greek wine" will actually make it sell, whereas in Canada, the same varieties are called "Selection"...).  But we have been having fun exploring and experimenting and decided we should see a winery.  Fortunately, there were a number of them in the eastern Peleponnese, and we were able to visit Lafazanis in Arheas Kleonas (Archaic Kleonae) Nemea.  We got an impromptu tour of the facility beginning with the bin where they dump the grapes and begin crushing them, through to bottling, including the cellar where all of this years' harvest was happily aging in French oak barrels.  And the still where they make the spirit from the wine leftovers.  We sampled some of everything.

As we were waiting for our guide to bring olives and bread to accompany our tasting, Randall was flipping through a cocktail table book on the area and found a ruin that we did not recognize from our prior explorations.  Of course the text was all in Greek, but I was able to read that it was a temple of Heracles.  And it was in the middle of the winery's vineyards about 500m down the road.

We bought a couple bottles of wine, and then went in search of the picture:

In the Peleponnese, ruins are everywhere, and like the big temple in Nemea, we could walk all around, over and through this temple to examine all the details of the carvings and what the blocks represent.  We clearly saw pieces of the pediment and columns, and triglyphs from the lintels, and for me, I saw it immediately for the 3D jigsaw puzzle that it was.  All I wanted to do was put all the pieces back together!  I already had most of the corners...

We were also stunned at how well-preserved it was in the middle of the vineyard, and like the other temple, it was below the current ground level, but had been dug out.

Really impressive--and the wine was good too!