Griechischer Wein

Udo Jürgens wrote the melody in 1972 after a holiday on Rhodes, by his own account in just twenty minutes, and he told Die Zeit he knew at once it would be a smash. Then he waited two years for the right words. The lyricists kept offering holiday clichés. It was Michael Kunze who had the idea that turned it into something else: set the song not in Greece but in Germany's industrial Ruhr, in the years of the first Greek guest workers. The result, produced by Ralph Siegel and released in 1974, is a small scene in a tavern on a dark, cool evening. The narrator walks in and finds a group of men far from home, listening to the music of the south. They pour him wine, and over it he hears their homesickness, their longing for green hills, sea and wind, for the wives and children they left behind, and their sense that in this city they will always remain strangers. It was an unusual subject for a Schlager, and it struck a nerve. The single went to number one in Germany and Switzerland in 1975 and to number two in Austria, and earned a gold record for 500,000 sales. Jürgens also recorded it in French, Greek and English. In thanks for giving voice to the guest workers, Greek prime minister Konstantinos Karamanlis received Jürgens and Kunze. In 2020 the magazine The Gap ranked it sixth among the 100 most important Austrian pop songs: a tune written in twenty minutes that turned out to be about loneliness.