The night before I went to the wine region of Nemea, Greece, I had a dream; I was in a Mediterannean village, all whitewashed walls and terracotta roofs. A place where life carried on at a pleasant pace punctuated by siestas and modest drinks at lunch time. At some indeterminable point the village was silently visited by a sandwich of magnificent proportion which towered above the people and buildings, a stoic monument to something as yet unknown. It's contents were vague and undefined, though something red hinted towards tomato or pepper and so the residents carved out and consumed chunks of this Motherlunch with expressions that conveyed as little certainty as that which they fed upon.
What was the meaning of this dream? I'm going to go with 'Allegory for Consumer Relationship with the Modern Industrial Food Factory', because it serves as a good way into what I'm going to talk about;
GREEK WINE
One of the ways to reach the valley and town of Nemea from the small village of Sykia is to take the new National Road which parallels it's still functioning predecessor, running in tandem with the coastline of the Gulf of Corinth. The journey takes about half an hour on broad smooth highways that are lit like a football stadium at night and interupted every so often with toll booths both manned and automated.
Another way is to put your trust in your smartphone to lead you safely and responsibly on one of the many smaller, single lane roads which you could be forgiven for thinking are a fixed or at least known (to google maps) quantity. This route requires much patience and many u-turns, takes an inestimable amount of time and will require all passengers to get out when you are unable to gain traction doing a hill start on the bare earth road. These hurdles will, however become meaningless when the view of the gulf disappears behind the mountains and you make your descent through a landscape that could be 100, 500 or even a thousand years ago. Little of the modern world is visible here; the odd tractor trundles past, irrigation lines can be seen here and there but besides that, nothing but groves and vineyards beset you on all sides. Riven with dirt tracks, the interlocking hillsides of the Nemea valley follow the river Asopos which meanders through these small parcels of production and has created a scene which has earned the area the title of 'The Tuscan Hills of Greece'. It is a far cry from the featureless factory style growing of Burgundy where mile upon uniform mile of uninterrupted vines are tended to by special tractors, able to drive above the crop rows and carry out mechanically the business which hands would once have done. Here the steep terrain, tiny dirt roads and small plots make mechanization the burden of other places, while manual labour remains the cradle which supports Nemean agricultural pursuits. The antithesis of the analogous mega sandwich of my dreams.
Taking any one of the minor roads through the valley, travelers will not be able to avoid passing vines on which grow the Agiorgitiko grape (pronounced something like EYE-or-GI-tiko and roll that 'r' briefly into the following 'G' so they meld together into almost an 'Y' sound) which translates to St. George's grape. This variety is local to Nemea and it has an ancestry having supposedly slaked the thirst of such historical heavy hitters as Hercules and King Agamemnon. It is known for it's red fruit and sweet spice aromas and has the ability to rival any Merlot you will find and is one of four 'Ambassador' wines chosen from around 300 indigenous varieties to showcase Greek wine in the international market.
So why is it that when I say "wine" no ones' mind springs to Greece?
"You're opening a big conversation" says Domink Brun when translating for Ioanna Lafkioti, owner of the 3rd generation winery Lafkiotis.
Ioanna explains,
"Greece has had difficulty, especially breaking into the British markets due to high import tax and commonwealth ties that favoured trade with the likes of Australia and New Zealand as the alternative to France and Italy".
This, along with the fact that Greece only exports around 10% of it's wine compared with the 50-60% that Spain, Italy and Portugal send abroad, have made Greece something of a backseat driver. The sixth backseat driver of European wine producers to be precise, predictably in the wake of France which in 2017 produced 46.2 million hectolitres where Greece made just 2.9 million.
There's more to it than just volumetrics though, as Stellios Boutaris of Ioannis Boutaris and Son Winery explains in an interview with Grape magazine
"[...]Greece does not have any tradition whatsoever in modern winemaking... Furthermore, during the '70s and '80s, many Greek restaurants in countries like Germany or the US were asking for cheap Greek wines. Despite the fact that Greece at the time was exporting a lot of wine, we weren't able to enter the main markets because our exports were based on a network of Greek wholesalers. And, to be honest, we also lacked good quality wines".
There has also been a shift in marketing; before the 1980s wine was usually labelled and sold on the strength of the region from which it came but since then the branding has changed to create a handful of superstar grapes who's names we all know. This gave new world wines an easy route into old world mouths but customers are beginning to look for more interesting and obscure varieties which could give Greece and advantage in the coming years.
But so what right? There's plenty of good wine available to anyone with a spare tenner in their pocket. Sure, but this is about discovery and alternative, about being a free and independent agent on this earth. One that doesn't feel obliged to go straight to the banner that reads "France" when standing agog in the supermarket wine department, knowing that most of the bottles will share the similarity of siblings rather than the variety of distant cousins.
The aforementioned Dominik Brun, along with business partner Nikos Bouzinellos run Venikos, a company founded specifically with the aim of establishing Nemea as a wine tourism destination within Greece. They offer wine tours, seminars and tastings all done in cooperation with the 40 member wineries of the SON, the wine makers association of Nemea. We were lucky enough to be hosted by Dominik and Nikos, both at the SON tasting room in the town of Nemea and also at House Venikos, where guests are entertained with wine tastings paired with fine gastronomy prepared onsite. We tasted around 10 wines, all from Nemea, and there were some real gems in there that would comfortably hold their own against any of the more commonly mouthed grapes and regions of the world. It could be said that these producers have too long been consigned to an undeserved obscurity so here's a little take away for you, a few favourites from the tasting table for you to find and try out:
Fysis, meaning 'nature' in Greek has, in my opinion, too conservative a label for what the bottle contains; the only natural wine produced in the Nemea PDO has, of course, no sulphites and is fermented with wild yeast as the aroma attests to. This was the fifth incarnation of Fysis that Athanasiou Winery had produced, and in the view of Nikos Bouzinellos, the best so far. And for what it's worth this was my favourite of the lot but anyone searching for a slug on this red horse will be lucky as only around 1,500 bottles were produced.
Rosé rarely does much for me but the sparkling Amalia made by Tselepos Winery got to me in mysterious ways and a week later I’m still carrying the aroma of strawberries. Alluring in colour and pleasantly sweet while maintaining balance, this is another example of what Agiorgitiko can do and another reason you should go and get some.
Photography: Victoria Retter