Gaia Wines Gaia Estate Nemea 2021
£33.25
The wine
With sweet fruits and a rich, velvety texture, this delivers great depth and complexity. A rich and expressive wine with concentrated notes of red and black fruits, vanilla, black pepper and violet enveloped in powerful yet smooth tannins, through to a long finish.
Nemea is Greece's most important red appellation, and its wines have been made since antiquity: the Nemean lion of the Hercules myth was killed here. The best vineyards sit at altitude on the slopes above the valley floor, where cooler nights give the acidity and aromatic definition that lower sites lack. This is Gaia's flagship Agiorgitiko.
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.
