Akriotou Orivatis Wild Old Vine Savatiano 2022
£14.75
The wine
A wildly expressive and complex wine, full of lemon, honeysuckle, peach, melon and buttery aromas. Textured and creamy, with concentrated layers of citrus fruit, wet stone, nuances of bread and a delicious honey note through to a long, intense finish.
Wild means the wine is fermented on its native yeasts rather than an inoculated strain, which gives a slower, less predictable ferment and considerably more textural complexity. Applied to old-vine Savatiano with extended lees ageing, it produces something genuinely serious from a grape most of Greece had written off.
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.
