Gaia Wines Clay Santorini Assyrtiko 2022
£41.45
The wine
Deep amber in colour, this richly textured, warming and aromatic orange wine delivers intense notes of candied tropical fruit and dried fruits, layered with vanilla and honeycomb nuances. Assyrtiko given extended skin contact in clay.
Clay is Assyrtiko given extended skin contact and fermented in clay amphorae, producing an orange wine rather than a white. Skin contact extracts colour, tannin and phenolic grip from the pale-skinned grape, and the clay allows a slow exchange of oxygen that oak or steel would not. A very small production, and unlike anything else on Santorini.
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.
