Gaia Wines Ammonite Santorini Assyrtiko 2023
£74.45
The wine
Rich, powerful and austere yet deliciously smooth, with a backbone of refreshing acidity enveloped by zesty citrus and an ever-present smoky flintiness. A wine of great balance and finesse, and the most serious Assyrtiko the estate makes.
Ammonite is the most serious Assyrtiko Gaia make, named for the fossils found in the limestone beneath the volcanic layers of Santorini. The island's old ungrafted vines yield tiny quantities, and the wine is built for age in a way almost no Greek white was thought capable of a generation ago.
The producer
Gaia Wines
View all Gaia Wines winesGaia was founded in 1994 by Leon Karatsalos and Yiannis Paraskevopoulos, and stands among the handful of estates that dragged Greek wine into the modern era. Paraskevopoulos holds a doctorate in oenology from Bordeaux, and the technical rigour shows throughout the range.
They work from two wineries in the two places that matter most for what they are trying to do: Nemea in the Peloponnese for Agiorgitiko, and Santorini for Assyrtiko. The Santorini vineyards are extraordinary in their own right, ungrafted and pre-phylloxera because the volcanic ash cannot host the louse, and trained into low basket shapes called kouloura that shelter the fruit from the Aegean wind.
The stated aim from the start was to explore the boundaries of the indigenous Greek varieties rather than plant international ones, and the range shows how far that can be pushed: a Retsina made seriously rather than as a joke, Assyrtiko fermented in acacia, in amphora and in stainless steel, and an eight-year-old Vinsanto from sun-dried grapes.
