Greece’s wines are impressive. Its tastings are not

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The quality and sophistication of today’s Greek wines are insider secrets in professional wine circles. But it’s high time word was spread about this new generation of gifted producers.

This usually happens by way of a generic promotional body for the region or country, which will organise tastings in key markets and, ideally, trips to the source for opinion-formers, who will then disseminate their findings. Given that the UK, where I’m based, is a key market for wine, the wine-trade diary here is crammed with up to four or more tastings a day from September to July.

The Greek government-backed Wines of Greece has been hosting tastings in London and New York. But we wine writers have found them hugely frustrating. An example: a tasting was organised in London last August for the wines of Attica, Greece’s most important wine region (and where fires have been raging recently). August is an unusual month for a tasting as temperatures soar, making wine service difficult, and so many people are on holiday. But that wasn’t the main problem. The invitation carried a warning: “Due to extremely strict Greek/EU funding regulations, the wine labels will be covered for this event and the wine names will not be listed in the tasting booklet. Of course, we will provide a list of the producers who have submitted wine.”

Cue outraged wine writers on Twitter. If we can’t recommend specific wines to our readers, why would we devote hours to a tasting? And it’s difficult to see any point in such an exercise for individual producers.

But the Greek authorities, unlike any others I have come across, have decided that if they give funds to wine promotion, it has to be strictly for the country or region alone. Identification of an individual wine, they have decreed, could be interpreted as promoting a brand. Hence the Attica blind (in perpetuity) tasting. Apparently when Wines of Greece host an official trip, to the island of Santorini for example, producers have to find a way of covering up every identifying feature of the bottle: labels, foils, bottle shape. A logistical nightmare!

Sue Harris of wine consultancy Westbury Communications has been organising generic wine events in the UK for 30 years. She was involved with the Attica tasting last year, but has declined to repeat the exercise. “I like my campaigns to result in increased sales and exports,” she says. Instead, this year she got together with Sofia Perpera of the Greek Wine Federation, an independent, non-profit association of Greek wine exporters, and they plotted how to organise a truly effective showing of what Greece has to offer.

They approached individual producers they thought might be interested in a tasting in the UK, asking for different financial contributions towards the cost according to the size of the enterprise. They managed to rustle up enthusiasm from 32 producers, and planned two tastings, one in Edinburgh and another in London.

So it was that on June 26, in the rather beautiful St John’s Church opposite Waterloo Station (built, appropriately enough, in the style described as Greek Revival), the air was thick with the melodic rhythms of Greek accents, and the perfumes of no fewer than 30 indigenous Greek grape varieties.

Just like Portugal, another up-and-coming wine producer, Greece boasts a thrilling range of disproportionately many native grapes. The best travelled of them is Santorini’s Assyrtiko (whose nervy white wines I celebrated in a column last October). In fact, one might argue that Assyrtiko is to Greek grapes what the relatively well-travelled Touriga Nacional of Dão and the Douro is to Portuguese grapes.

Because I have written relatively recently about the delights of Assyrtiko, and because there were more than 170 wines on show, I agreed with my fellow Master of Wine Julia Harding, a Greek wine expert, that I would taste the reds and she would taste the whites.

Although the popular conception of Greece is of a hot, red wine-producing country, the first modern Greek wines to make an impact abroad have been white, from sea-cooled islands or high altitudes. 

But Greece’s red wines have been catching up fast. The Greek red grape most likely to resonate with current tastes is Xinomavro, grown throughout northern Greece but particularly associated with Naoussa in the far north. Xinomavro (meaning “acid black”) is a bit like the Nebbiolo of Barolo and Barbaresco fame. It shares with that fashionable variety a fairly light colour, marked acidity and tannin in its youth and a rather haunting aroma. I love it.

Agiorgitiko is the most-planted red wine grape in Greece. It’s particularly associated with the fuller-bodied, age-worthy wines in the Nemea appellation in the north-east of the Peloponnese, where vineyards grow at over 900m, higher than most red-wine vines in France or Italy, and the cool mountain nights retain the grape’s freshness and flavour.

There’s a sense in modern Greek viticulture that all these ambitious wine producers are revelling in discovering and promulgating lesser-known local grapes (which tend, confusingly, to have several local synonyms and different spellings). Among the grapes responsible for the wines I tasted at St John’s were the Liatiko and Kotsifali of Crete, Mandilaria (known as Mavrokoundoura on the island of Evia), Mouhtaro or Mouchtaro pioneered by the Muses Estate north-west of Athens and Santorini’s Mavrotragano. Avgoustiatis (a name also applied to other grapes that ripen early, in August) produced a charming red on the island of Samos. Mavrodaphne, long used to make sweet, strong reds, is now being grown at altitude and harnessed for some fine dry reds.

If these reds share a characteristic, it is a certain earthy dustiness, revealing that their grapes were grown in a very dry climate. All of them are distinctly different and distinctly Greek. My thanks to organisers Harris and Perpera for allowing us to see the labels.

Tasting notes, scores and suggested drink dates on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. Some international stockists on Wine-searcher.com

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