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Stavroula Kourakou
Stavroula Kourakou-Dragona was born in Athens in 1928. She holds a PhD in Chemistry, with studies in Oenology in France, and for twenty years (1964-1984) was director of the Wine Institute, a technological research foundation of the then Ministry of Agriculture.
She was the representative of Greece to the Council of Europe, as well as to the OIV, the intergovernmental Organization of Vine and Wine with 45 member-states and headquarters in Paris, from 1960 until 1979, in which year she was elected unanimously to its presidency. She has visited on missions almost all the vine-growing countries in the world, acquiring experience and offering services to the international community, in recognition of which she has been decorated by France and Spain.
Member of numerous international scientific societies, corresponding member of the Agricultural Academy of France, member of the Italian Academy of Vine and Wine, she served repeatedly as president of EEC Committees on issues concerning vine and wine legislation, and alcoholic beverages. As president of the ad hoc Committee of the Council of Ministers of Agriculture, she recommended and succeeded in the voting of the EEC regulation on alcoholic beverages, in the framework of which the recognition and protection of the product name ¡ouzo¢ was ratified as exclusively Greek.
In 1964, as head of the Wine Institute, she recommended the establishment and protection by law of those wines from Greek regions which could constitute the category of wines with geographical name of origin: wines ¡Appellation of Origin¢. Thus she initiated a research project covering the whole of Greece, as consequence of which forgotten indigenous vine varieties were enhanced and viticulture was expanded to regions that were famed for the quality of their wines in earlier centuries but had been abandoned, either due to the historical vicissitudes of Greece or to the destruction of the vines by phylloxera.
In the 1970s, on her recommendation, the first geographical names of origin were acknowledged by legislation and the first Greek wines ¡Appellation of Origin¢ appeared in the market. These she supported and continues to support with numerous articles in the Greek and foreign Press, with papers at conferences and international fora, as well as with books.
She was a visionary civil servant, a technocrat, with the will-power and energy to turn her vision into action.
Important too are her publications on subjects of antiquarian interest, given that she has studied assiduously the ancient Greek and Latin literary sources, and is the author of a series of works on the Vine and Wine in the ancient Hellenic world.