Assyrtiko to Agiorgitiko – An Introduction to Greek Wines
With its roots dating back some 6,500 years, Greece is one of the oldest wine-producing regions in the world. Within the last few decades, the Greek Wine Region has gone through significant modernization, specifically the planting of international grape varietals.
Greece is also home to 80 native wine grapes, each with its individual expression and uniqueness. Even in Greece, indigenous grape varieties were long overshadowed by their far more famous counterparts from Italy or France – indeed many of them almost went extinct until enterprising local winemakers rediscovered them growing in forgotten corners.
But they now form the basis of an industry that is rapidly growing in confidence and sophistication, producing fascinating wines that capture the myriad terroirs of Greece’s diverse landscape, from sun-drenched, windswept islands to cool mountain slopes.
Kyro Melas
Kyros Melas is a successful businessman and an aficionado of fine wine and Greece. The inner strength that drives him to produce great wine is based on a personal challenge.
It all started during a dinner in Zurich, while drinking Chateau La Fleur. He bet on Greece, taking up a fellow diner’s challenge that he could make a better wine than Chateau La Fleur in his homeland – Greece.
“I was enjoying a fabulous old bottle of Lafleur over dinner in Geneva with an old friend, when he said that he thought it was such a pity that, with thousands of years of winemaking tradition in Greece, the country couldn’t produce anything of the quality of the bottle we were enjoying that evening. It was at that moment that I made the decision, that producing an equal to that bottle of Lafleur in Greece was exactly what I was going to do.”
Producing an icon wine in Greece has absolutely been part of Kyros Melas’ ambition for his estate from day one. With that philosophy in mind, every minute detail at the La Tour Melas estate has been done properly, from the design and planting of the vineyard to the winery and the guesthouses.
His success is obvious, as he managed to make what, by general admission, is a very good wine in a region that is obscure to today’s winemaking world – further proof that there’s a wine-land in every corner of this country.
Winemaking
Wine production in La Tour Melas generally goes through four stages.
1. Manual harvesting & destemming
2. Fermenting in temperature-controlled vats
3. Aging for 22 months in new French oak barrels
4. Bottling, storing, labelling and crating
In 2006, La Tour Melas dug into the mountain and constructed an ultra-modern gravity-fed winery. The underground structure with four levels was designed to be temperature-controlled, which also allows for wine to flow seamlessly by gravity from one step to the next, suitably leaving little need for pumps.
La Tour Melas uses 90% new barrels every year. Bottling is only done by hand, and correct corking requires repeated inspection of each cork during the process. The bottles rest thereafter in their underground cellars for at least 6 months prior to release.
