Gaia Wines Notios Red 2025
£13.45
The wine
Notios, the Southerner, is a youthful style with a refreshing, velvety texture and intense aromas of summer pudding fruits with spicy flavours of fresh herbs. Soft tannins underlie a well-structured palate, through to a delicious, vibrant finish.
Notios means the southerner. Agiorgitiko provides the soft, rounded red fruit that the variety gives naturally, and Syrah adds structure and a peppery lift. Both are grown at altitude in the Peloponnese, where the elevation moderates a climate that would otherwise be too hot for wines of this freshness.
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.
