Manousakis Winery — Nostos Syrah 2021

Few wines divide opinion quite like the Nostos Syrah from Manousakis. Yiannis Karakasis once named the 2014 a candidate for the best Syrah in Greece, while Pavlos Gegas and Julia Harding downright penalise its emphatically reductive style: Gegas rated the 2017 at 85, the 2018 at 83 and the 2020 at 87, Harding gave the 2018 a 14.5 and the 2020 a 16 out of 20. Nostos means the homecoming, and with this wine Ted Manousakis returned, after decades in America, to his Cretan village of Vatolakkos, where he grows the Rhône variety Syrah organically and without irrigation.

As a vintage, 2021 was hot and marked by drought on Crete; three heatwaves without a drop of rain produced small, concentrated berries with soft acidity. That places 2021 a notch below the balanced, classic 2020, and from a year like this one expects power and ripeness rather than finesse, with the risk that the alcohol gains the upper hand.

I tasted it alongside two other Syrahs of the same vintage, the Australian Penfolds St Henri and the Peloponnesian Lacules; at a good thirty-five euros it is by far the most affordable of the three. On the nose it is the most expressive of the trio: grilled tomato, balsamic, thyme, and grapefruit besides. On the palate it seems smooth at first, almost a touch flat, the tannin finer and more herbal than in the St Henri and less opaque. But then it reverses the order, the finish stronger than the actual flavour, drying, yet in a pleasant way, and the grapefruit returns, tapering off sweetly, carried by that very reductive, savoury-earthy depth over which opinions part ways. You have to like this style, and I do. It is by far the most interesting of the three; only the Lacules came across as more elegant.

What is remarkable is that this wine, from what is actually the weaker year, makes more of itself than the vintage promises. The better-regarded 2020, which Gegas even ranked above the 2017 at 87 and which Harding lifted to 16 out of 20, I found coarser next to this 2021 and crushed by alcohol, whereas the 2021 translates the heat into tension and interest. The 2017 from this house I had noted in 2023, at six years old, at 96 points, well above Gegas's 85; the 2021 doesn't quite convince me to that degree, but I would drink it now. For me it's 95 points.