Akriotou Orivatis Old Vine Savatiano 2025
£12.25
The wine
Made from the native Savatiano grape, this offers a complex and aromatic bouquet of ripe peach, quince, creamy vanilla and an intriguing hint of Turkish delight. Dry, with perfectly balanced freshness, and intense notes of grapefruit, pepper, ginger and wild mint through to a long, spicy finish.
Savatiano is Greece's most planted grape and almost universally dismissed, because for decades it was the base of cheap industrial Retsina. Old bush vines tell a different story. Orivatis means mountaineer, and these vines sit at 280 to 380 metres, dry-farmed and decades old, giving texture nobody expects from the variety.
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.
