Greek Wine World » Peloponnese

Agiorgitiko The Wise Owl

admin — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 14:43:48 +0000

This joint venture underlines the open-minded attitude of Nemea-based I Sofia tis Fisis (Nature’s Wisdom) and the forward thinking of the Katogi-Strofilia wineries. It all started after a casual roadside meeting between Nikos Bouzinelos and veteran Achilleas Lampsidis. As Sofia tis Fisis make Greek varietal and herb-infused vinegar, petimezi (grape syrup), and other grape-based products, they are not geared to make wine per se.

A healthy dose of skepticism enters my mind every time I read “organically farmed grapes” on a label. “Who is your neighbor”, is the first of many questions any wine writer worth his salt should ask. So after tasting this news-worthy effort, off I went to see where The Wise Owl grapes originate. Beyond a pretty bucolic setting of olive groves interrupted by nature’s exclamation marks, cypress trees, this Paleochori single vineyard on the north-eastern flank of Koutsi is in good company: conifers. With a growing demand from the US market and Europe for natural wines, both principals jumped to the opportunity and joined their talents. Petros Keknopoulos, oenologist at the Katogi-Strofilia winery in Nemea’s Asprokambos, was the perfect man to take up this challenge. His principals had the good sense to send him off for a year to become a post graduate student at the Australian Wine Research Institute, in Adelaide. “No-sulphite wine is the most difficult to control. Luckily, harvest had not yet begun. There is quite a lot of preparation; one needs to sterilize all the kit. It is a demanding but fun project.”

So all you switched-on readers are by now wondering why the back label still states: “10 parts per million of sulphur”. The answer is that the fermentation process naturally creates tiny quantities of sulphur. Interestingly, white wine produces higher amounts than red. Another tip: Just after harvest, I got to taste the 2011 Wise Owl. It is fruitier. No lover of Nemea should give this wine a miss. It is a new to all of us facet of this charmer of a grape. Yet again, as this novel approach clearly demonstrates, we really know very little about its dynamics.

Very dark for this grape, as no-added-sulphite wines usually are. Bright floral notes with black pepper. Textbook Agiorgitiko core of cherries on the mid-palate. Ripe tannins, spice following through on the rich, tasty finish. Vibrant and pure. Such a sense of place that not all of Koutsi (500m) is capable of. Stylistically, a modern take of Nemea, which I first encountered in 1993. Serve it at cellar temperature in large glassware. For immediate enjoyment. Best 2011-2013.

Score: 16 / 20

For more information please visit www.sofiatisfisis.gr and www.katogi-strofilia.gr

Nemea Mitravelas Estate

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:45:00 +0000

This centenarian negociant, vineyard owner and, more recently, bottler is one of Nemea’s top addresses. There are no secrets to their success. Intimate knowledge of the valley-floor best-draining name places. Equally at home with which hillside performs best in a given vintage. Their long-established contacts with some of the best farmers add to a considerable deck of cards. Managing all this is Kostas Mitravelas, a straight-talking and low-key member of Nemea’s younger generation of historic wine families. The oenologist Gregory Vrettos, whose dark handsome good looks would not be out of place in an Armani advertisement, is another asset to this going places estate. Behind his boyish charm lies one of the better talents to graduate from the Athens University. This busy 26-year-old also manages to find time to run a full-time agricultural laboratory in his home town of Thiva. Vrettos also handles the estate’s exports and travels extensively to open new markets. The year 2006 was a pretty vintage in Nemea. Most of the old-vine Aghiorghitiko was safely picked before the last 20% of the harvest was hit by heavy rains.
Medium dark. Blue rim. Broadly fruited. Black cherries. Round palate with melt-in-mouth suave tannins. Succulent supple finish. Still more to come. Could not be more appellation-true. If you are new to the elegant charms of Nemea, this is one of the best introductions to old-vine (+35-year-old bush vines) examples now on the scene. Best 2010-2015.

Score: 17.5/20

See review of another wine by this Estate: Kokkino se Mavro

For more details, please visit: www.mitravelas.com
Greece distributor: www.cavahalari.gr
UK: www.bibendum-wine.co.uk

Malagousia Antonopoulos Vineyards

admin — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:31:06 +0000

Anything with the word Malagousia on the label seems much in demand. Apparently, exports are up in the U.S., and interest is growing in Northern Europe. Despite new plantings, so far, demand far outstrips supply. Are all Malagousias that worthy? The short answer is no. With the sudden weather changes of the more recent vintages, I find this ultrafashionable grape has an increasingly less uniform quality about it. The worst – oily and blowsy– manage caricature expressions of this fragrant dry, ideal as an aperitif, wine. The chief suspect: vineyard management. There is a strong quality correlation between addresses who are pro-active in the vineyard and ones who still hang on to a bygone happy-go-lucky route. Let’s face it: The last exceptional across the board white wine vintage was back in 2005. With the climate change, now even white wine farming is more demanding. To paraphrase a real-estate term, the new mantra is irrigation, irrigation, irrigation. More precisely: measured stress, irrigation, measured stress, irrigation, and so on.
The longstanding oenologist and guiding light at Antonopoulos, Michalis Probonas, has always paid attention to nature. Like other stellar colleagues, he spends most of his time amongst the vines. In the Antonopoulos vineyards there is a new factor in the equation: The more recent Demestika 900-m.-high vineyard has been bearing exceptionally balanced fruit. It was first shown to me (the picture on the home page of their website) as a bare knoll in the mid-1990s. It has now grown up, and the breezy qualities in terms of natural freshness end up in several of this pioneering boutique’s innovative and clever blends.
2009 was a difficult vintage. Exceptions are emerging in several delicate and insistent white wines. Yellow, lime tints. Light carbonic gas prickle. Attractive ripe grassy notes. Pit stone (peach) aroma. Crunchy apple- and white pepper-textured mid-palate. Tension and a bone-dry, elegant, mineral finish. Polished. At 12.2% ABV, a strong candidate to welcome spring with al fresco sipping. Best 2010-12.

Score: 16.5/20

For more details please visit: www.antonopoulos-vineyards.com

Greece distributor: www.cavahalari.gr

Cava Domaine Mercouri

admin — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 07:48:29 +0000

After the autumn rains, the Ionio Pelagos humidity clears up. Almost within reach, the mountain outline of the island of Zakynthos comes into focus. At dusk, visible from the Mercouri Estate gardens, car lights flicker across from the island that the Venetians called the Fioro de Levante. Cava Mercouri is home to the setting of perhaps the prettiest natural outdoor ‘tasting room’ under a corridor of pine trees. It is in this sheltered tranquil oasis that I recently tasted a selection of the older red vintages. For a full progress report you will have to wait for the publication of the forthcoming book. Meanwhile, of the many bottles opened, one stood out: the Cava 2006. This label is a vineyard selection of the finest grapes. Refosco dal Penduncolo Rosso (80%) and Mavrodaphne (20%), the small berried tsingela, though technicians are not in unison that it is a clone per se.

Most of you unfamiliar with Greek and European wine laws must be wondering what the word ‘Cava’ is doing on a still red wine. Simply put, when Spain joined the EU, in 1986, two Southern European wine cultures had different interpretations of the term. Luckily, it concerned very different types of wine. In short, Spain kept Cava for their Catalan sparkling white wine, and Greece kept Cava for still cellar-aged white, to a lesser degree, and mostly red wine.

Dark. Bright fruit. Intense. Refosco freshness and structure. Spicy wood and currant fruit with soft, generous Mavrodaphne tannins. A hint of tobacco on the finish. Very pure. Poised. A more modern, rounder tannin profile than earlier vintages (the stellar 2000 comes to mind). Partly down to malolactic fermentation now taking place in cask. Few wines reflect with such clarity their place of origin – in this case the balmy, warmer maritime Ionian. Recommended in carafe. Best 2010-2020.

Score: 17.5/20

For more information, please visit www.mercouri.gr

Gaia S

admin — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:01:13 +0000

While tasting at Gaia’s Nemea-Koutsi winery a few years back, I was looking out of their tasting room. Staring at me, amongst their Aghiorghitiko vineyard, was a patch of young vines. I asked what clones and rootstock they were using. I got a very different answer from the usually humdrum numbered codes and the like. “It is Syrah. As the soil is marl, it is a gamble,” replied Yianni Paraskevopoulos. That’s news, I said to myself. Since Gaia’s inception in 1994, they have devoted their energies only to indigenous varieties.

Syrah thrives on granitic slopes dusted with mica. It does rather well on schist at various sites in the Iberian peninsula. In Greece’s fragmented vineyard, this sun and wind grape has been taken to a variety of different latitudes, microclimates and soil types. With promising, to very good, results so far, easily outperforming the darling of the 1980s and 1990s, the ubiquitous Cabernet Sauvignon.

Central Crete, the red soils of Maronia on the northern Aegean shoreline, and the sandy-limestone bedrock of cooler-climate Amyndeon are three top-performing Syrah sites that spring to mind. These early (since the 1990s) Syrahs display lovely aromatic complexity and flavours. So, you may ask, how is this incomer adapting on a hillside in Nemea? Having tasted ’06-’07-’08 vintages in cask solo, it does not thrill me. Muted aroma, “sweeter” than Aghiorghitiko. As they say, it is no great shakes. Thus far it is of mild interest – a work in progress. The answer lies in the cellar and not in the vineyard. This Franco-Hellenic marriage does become something rather different when blended and in bottle. The Koutsi terroir dominates the Syrah, packing it with finesse and toning down the pepper and other usual Syrah aromatics fireworks. It is a clever blend. With 70% of Aghiorghitiko, it essentially becomes a new type of wine. Think of it as a mixed-blood well-mannered cosmopolitan. Does it have a raison d’être? Unreservedly yes. Are we witnessing the birth of a super Nemea as Tuscany experienced in the 1970s? Quite possibly, but only time will tell. So far, the all-indigenous Gaia Estate is superior. That Syrah patch yielded enough in 2007 to produce 7,614 numbered unfiltered bottles. Price-wise, Gaia S sits just below Gaia Estate. As the first two vintages sold out within 48 hours even with the current economic downturn, there seems to be a demand for the new and unusual.

Youthful purple rim. Medium dark. Seductive floral aroma with “sweet” berry notes. Round and juicy. Warm fruited. Long and intensely flavoured, oozing black cherries. Bold but soft tannins. Vanilla notes meshed with Koutsi signature limestone mineral. Still raw. Worth decanting. Best 2011-17.

Score: 17.5/20

For more information, please visit www.gaia-wines.gr

Red on Black Nemea Mitravelas Estate

admin — Tue, 05 May 2009 09:15:53 +0000

As the largest in size appellation planted to one grape, Nemea has much going for it: Proximity to Athens, the nation’s largest single market. A countryside reminiscent of Umbria or Southern Tuscany. No wonder it is a hot destination for wine exploring weekends. The town of Nemea itself is not attractive, a fact made all the more apparent by its pretty location on the foothills of Mount Profitis Ilias, studded with a diverse maquis, olive groves, conifers. Imposing, above the town is the old school with its neoclassical facade. It was to this school that Kostas Mitravelas went. This soft spoken 30 something is the fourth generation Nemea merchant of bulk wine. Without much fanfare, in 2004, he started to bottle some of his best batches. Having tasted yearly with him, I have made him one of my Nemea templates. If only other Nemea producers paid such attention to his vineyard appraisal and blending discipline. Assisted by 20 something oenologist Gregory Vrettos, and with much hard work, they have quickly risen to one of Nemea’s top addresses. Sensibly, with the current crisis, they are concentrating on two labels only. The other being the Mitravelas Estate, a cask fermented, dense, more expensive wine. It is good; different to many that have come my way. There will be a future posting. Meantime, the estate’s trump card remains the Red on Black(Kokkino se Mavro).

It is a blend of +20 year old, mostly bush vines. The colour is deep, of blue-purple rim. A burst of fruit, with the black cherries of Aghiorghitiko leaping out of the glass. It has good structure. Richly flavoured, with freshness keeping it interesting all through the finish. Polished. Retailing in Greece at Euro 6 per bottle, this ‘rule breaker’ (slightly chilled) soft fruity red wine is a cracker. You will not find so much bang for your money elsewhere from this in vogue appellation.

Score: 16,5/20

For more details please visit: www.mitravelas.com

UK Agent : www.bibendum-wine.co.uk

Where to stay and eat in Nemea: Yiorgos Sofos rooms above his restaurant at the end of the square, near the monument of the Fallen Soldier is a welcoming oasis.
Cellular: (+30) 6945493538

Nemea Zafiri

admin — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 09:15:04 +0000

As I stood in the grounds of the chapel of Ai Giorgis, at the edge of Nemea, the town, I took in the views unfolding in front of me. There is snow on Mt.Kilini(2,300m). Near by a row of almond trees has blossomed. Fallow fields are vivid green. Pruning in the vineyards has started in earnest. Heading for my visit to the Zafiri winery I run into a retired farmer who I first met in the 1990′s. He was grinning from ear to ear. ‘There has been much rain, from Xmass to early February. His facial expression became pensive. This fuss on climate change… pause… is true. A dusting of snow in town is getting rarer. My grandchildren have yet to witness it! ‘ After more small talk I get my brief on, what else, wine politics and the customary invitation to the kafeneion. Plenty of coffee and tsipouro to go round. I don’t mind either, it’s the smoking that keeps me away.

I first visited the Zafiri winery nearly a decade ago. It is one of 30 wineries scattered all over town and in various villages in the appellations sprawling 2,500 hectares. Achileas Lampsidis of the Oktana group was renting space and helping out an Australia-based French oenologist making wine for some English super market chain. The pound was stronger. Greek wine was in vogue in the UK. It was a different world. As it happened, there was no Zafiri in sight.

Finally, in the courtyard, stood Dina Zafiri. ‘ There are lots of Z’s in our family, followed by a lovely grin. My husband’s name is Andreas Zavos, he is in the vineyards. One my daughters name is… Zaharoula’. We tasted all 2008 tanks. Two lesser ones, most rather good. A small selection is cask aged and bottled. The 2007′s and 2008 were in cask. The 2007 are atypical, due to heat waves and lack of rain, in two words, concentrated and textured. The 2008 is turning out to be good to very good. Fruit and tannins in balance, especially true for wine from older bush vines. Kiato based oenologist Yiannis Ligas is the consulting oenologist. Athens University assistant professor Giorgos Kotseridis supervises the bottled wine. If only more bulk merchants would follow their approach. The Z’s are onto a good thing.

A blend of two single vineyards. Koutsi and Heraklio(Arhea Nemea). The latter is from + 40 year old ungrafted bush vines. Good colour. Black cherry fruit exhuding finesse. More depth and complexity than most. Attractive slightly rustic bite on the finish. Character and individuality. Priced Euro7,50 a bottle at the winery.

Score: 16,5/20

Zafiri Wines, Nemea.
For more information please log on: www.zafiriwines.gr
Tel:+(30): 27460 22324
Cell: + 6948 203251 or +6944 452968
Contact e-mail : info@zafiriwines.gr

Malvasia Aromatica Ktima Anastasiou

admin — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:14:00 +0000

Nemea, the appellation, is overwhelmingly planted with one of the more seductive indigenous red grapes, the Aghiorghitiko. Some white grapes are also to be found. Savatiano, Roditis, more recently Assyrtiko and the usual and in my opinion, so far, less successful (cosmopolitan)suspects.

The 15 stremata (1,5 hectares) of this producers Malvasia Aromatica is a new departure. Few grapes can muster, such a broad aromatic spectrum and actually taste of fresh grapes. Over the past 15 years, a tiny acreage of M.A. has emerged in various cooler (Velvendo) and warmer sites such as Nemea. This new to me varietal is to be found in Arhea Nemea is what Nemeans refer to as Heraklio.

Specifically, the full name of this estates cultivar is the Malvasia di Candia Aromatica. It is a distinctly different type of the many to be found in Italy under the umbrella term of Malvasia. It is also reputed to have the most personality which jibes with the Anastasiou’s effort. It is an inspiring choice. A stand out from the plethora of labels on offer by the other 29 Nemea based wineries.

The winery was founded in 1954. In a period, when Greece had to heal the social and financial ravages of WWII and it’s bitter civil war(1944-1947). Kyriakos Anastasiou now runs this artisan family owned and managed address. It is easy to locate, on the main road, which runs from Arhea Nemea to the larger in size, nearby, Nemea valley. They do brisk cellar door sales and increasingly sell to wine merchants.

Pink hued & slightly spritzy. Floral. Rose-petal, acacia and mandarin. Almost muscat flavours with peachiness riding on rich mouth filling grapey fleshiness. Dry finish. More than just a novelty value. Begs for chilli-lemongrass Thai dishes. Cellar door price? A most reasonable Euro 5 per bottle.

Score: 16/20

Ktima Anastasiou , Arhea Nemea Korinthias
Tel: + (30)27460 23123
Contact e-mail : anastasiou_wines@yahoo.gr