Muses Estate

Nikolaos Zaharias founded a small winery at Askri in 1946, in the Valley of the Muses beneath Mount Helicon in Central Greece. His son Athanasios joined in 1967 and turned the artisanal cellar into a modern estate, and the family are now in their third generation.

The valley is the one classical Greek poetry places the Muses in, and Hesiod, who wrote the Theogony, was a farmer here in the eighth century BC. The vineyards climb to around 500 metres on limestone, and the altitude does what altitude does everywhere: slows ripening, preserves acidity and sharpens aromatics in a country where heat is usually the problem.

What sets the estate apart is Mouhtaro, a dark-skinned variety found essentially nowhere outside this valley. It had dwindled almost to nothing before the family committed to it, and they now make more of it than anyone. Alongside it they work Savatiano from old bush vines, a grape most people know only as the base of indifferent Retsina and which deserves considerably better.