Boutari – Cava 1976

The Boutari Cava 1976 is the oldest Greek wine in my notes. Until now that place was held by the Cavino Nemea 1978, which I recorded in 2023 at 45 years of age with 90 points. This particular bottle was around 50 years old at the tasting in October 2026. I bought it at auction, and it was one of four Boutari wines I tasted together – the current Cava 2020, the Grande Reserve 2013, the Grande Reserve 1993 and this very 1976.

Boutari was founded in 1879 by Ioannis Boutaris in Naoussa, and when this wine was made the house was run by Giannis and Konstantinos Boutaris, who had taken it over in 1968 – even before the Stenimachos winery opened in 1978. The Cava line was on the market by 1974 at the latest, having begun in the early 1970s, as Dimitris Koumanis writes. "Cava" here stands for aged wines. As a legal category the term was only regulated in Greece in 1987; in 1976 it was not yet that. A price comparison from 1974 shows that the Cava was the upmarket line back then. The Cava cost 90 drachmas, the simple Boutari 40, so more than double. Today that has been reversed: at Boutari the Cava sits under "Our Brands," while Grande Reserve and 1879 Legacy sit under "Our Premiums."

The grape varieties cannot be cleanly documented for 1976. According to the early recipe as described by Koumanis, they are presumably Xinomavro and Agiorgitiko, with no record of the proportions. The alcohol is 11.5 percent. For 1976 my vintage database has no Greek figure. So the expectation here does not come from the year but from the age and from someone else's tasting. Dimitris Koumanis singled out the 1976 in his Cava vertical for Heteroclito in 2019 as one of the special vintages, astonishingly lively, with a rather restrained nose and an elegantly matured palate.

Little of that was apparent in my bottle. The cork of this bottle was unfortunately no longer very presentable, quite shrunken, and it was something of an art just to get it out at all. In the glass a fairly brownish colour. The nose, though, unlike with Koumanis, was in fact astonishingly aromatic, a great deal of sweet figs, really almost excessively expressive. On the palate, however, a rather unpleasant acidity, a cloying finish, a cloying aftertaste. A pity.

This is the counterpart to the young Cava 2020, which I noted at 86 points in the same tasting. There a decent acidity, here a rather unpleasant one; there a fairly bitter finish, here a cloying one; on the nose there some sour cherry and a touch of cocoa, here a great deal of sweet figs. Between the two lie 44 years and two eras of recipe, and not every difference is merely ageing.

This 1976 is already a fair way past its peak, though it has not just tipped over. At only 70 points it comes in 15 points behind the Grande Reserve 2013 with 85 in the tasting; the Cava 2020 reached 86, the Grande Reserve 1993 reached 87. For the 1976 itself I give no price; the current Cava costs around 12 euros in Greece. For me these are 70 points. But what more should one expect after 50 years from a wine like this?