Akriotou Erimitis White 2025
£14.95
The wine
Delicate notes of peach, bergamot, lemon, citrus, pear and white flowers are complemented by buttery overtones, through to a textured and rich palate with the flavours echoed from the nose and a refreshing, zesty finish.
Erimitis means hermit. Savatiano with Assyrtiko and a little Aidani, the latter a Santorini variety usually found in Vinsanto. Evia is the long island running alongside the mainland north of Athens, and its mountain vineyards are among the least known in Greece. Fermented and aged with texture in mind.
The producer
Akriotou
View all Akriotou winesVasiliki Akriotou is an oenologist with over twenty years in the industry who founded her own micro-winery in central Greece in 2015. The scale is genuinely small and the wines are made almost entirely by hand.
Her subject is Savatiano, and the choice is a deliberate provocation. It is the most planted grape in Greece and almost universally dismissed, because for decades it was the base of cheap industrial Retsina and was farmed for volume rather than quality. Old bush vines tell a different story: low-yielding, deep-rooted, and capable of texture and complexity that nobody expected.
The vineyards sit at 280 to 380 metres among the mountains of Sterea Ellada and Evia, and several parcels are dry-farmed and decades old. Wild fermentation and extended lees ageing do the rest. Few producers have done more to rehabilitate a grape most of the country had written off.
