WELCOME TO GREEK WINES

A sunny evening in March finally gave us the chance to open the tasting year outdoors with Greek rosé. Moschofilero is a red-skinned variety, much like, say, Pinot Gris, which we know here. Under German wine law, such grapes always yield white wine. In Greece, though, as also for instance in Italy, it's very common to call the sometimes genuinely quite colourful resulting wine a rosé – or rather, what you often even get served in tavernas as κόκκινο κρασί (red wine) belongs i

For this year's Easter celebration there was once again Greek Merlot, which we then retasted a few days later with friends over a few nibbles. As an appetiser we also had a rosé, the ΡΟΕΖ Merlot 2020 from Oinotropai Winery. This small estate in PGI Messinia produces a few exciting reds we will come back to - the Merlot, however, is made as a rosé. As such it is quite rare in Greece as a single varietal - and not only there: at Lobenberg, just three such wines are currently li

One of the highest-rated wines of last year - the Areti red 2013 from Ktima Biblia Chora - which received 18 points from us, was a single-varietal Agiorgitiko. So it is high time we devoted ourselves to this variety (which Yiannis Karakasis introduces here) in more detail. The start shall be made by two articles in which we discuss a few wines that already reveal a great deal about this variety. The next post will be about blends. Today, however, Agiorgitiko stands in the spo

The ancient seafaring people of the Phoenicians, familiar to many from Asterix and Obelix, left behind quite a few treasures on their voyages across the Mediterranean (at Aliseda, for instance, and El Carambolo). This article, too, is about a mysterious good they carried with them - one that may recently have been raised from the depths by Vassilios Tsaktsarlis. A fascinating story of an oenological treasure ... I have already covered the background in the report on Ktima Bib

The Kotsifali variety is often regarded as the Cretan counterpart to French Merlot. Just as Merlot in Bordeaux gives Cabernet Sauvignon a softer polish, Kotsifali is meant, in a cuvée with Mandilaria, to offset the latter's excessively assertive tannins. Mandilaria certainly has plenty of those, while lacking alcohol and intense aromatics. All the more exciting, then, that the winery Silva Daskalaki goes entirely its own way! The "Enstikto" is made up of 70% Kotsifali and 30%

In the last post (in German), I talked about the possibility of brightening cold winter days with the exotic aromas of Greek Sauvignon Blanc. That strategy naturally doesn't work for Christmas itself, though – there you want something classic, something that fits the mood, more cosy than exciting, contemplative, sure, but please not a wine that demands a lot of brainwork, more delicious and suited to the whole family than totally out there. For this post, then, I went back th