Muses Estate Assyrtiko 2025
£14.25
The wine
Vibrant, mineral-driven and textural, balancing the signature high acidity of Assyrtiko with a creamy mouthfeel from extended lees ageing. Bright citrus, white flowers and a saline finish, reflecting the old bush vines, wild fermentation and high-altitude terroir of the Valley of the Muses.
Assyrtiko grown at around 500 metres on limestone in Central Greece rather than on Santorini's volcanic ash. The altitude substitutes for the island's cooling wind, and the wine keeps the variety's characteristic salinity and mineral drive. Old bush vines, wild fermentation and extended lees ageing give the creamy weight.
The producer
Muses Estate
View all Muses Estate winesNikolaos Zaharias founded a small winery at Askri in 1946, in the Valley of the Muses beneath Mount Helicon in Central Greece. His son Athanasios joined in 1967 and turned the artisanal cellar into a modern estate, and the family are now in their third generation.
The valley is the one classical Greek poetry places the Muses in, and Hesiod, who wrote the Theogony, was a farmer here in the eighth century BC. The vineyards climb to around 500 metres on limestone, and the altitude does what altitude does everywhere: slows ripening, preserves acidity and sharpens aromatics in a country where heat is usually the problem.
What sets the estate apart is Mouhtaro, a dark-skinned variety found essentially nowhere outside this valley. It had dwindled almost to nothing before the family committed to it, and they now make more of it than anyone. Alongside it they work Savatiano from old bush vines, a grape most people know only as the base of indifferent Retsina and which deserves considerably better.
