Oenops Xinomavro 2024
£19.75
The wine
A charming and elegant Xinomavro with enticing cherry and floral notes layered with spice and mineral tones. Wonderful purity of fruit with a delicate freshness on the smooth finish.
Xinomavro is northern Greece's great red grape and the backbone of Naoussa. The name means acid-black, and it is often compared to Nebbiolo for its pale colour, formidable tannin, high acidity and long life. Its unmistakable markers are sun-dried tomato and olive, which no other variety quite produces.
The producer
Oenops Wines
View all Oenops Wines winesOenops was founded in 2015 by Nikos Karatzas, who works as a negociant rather than an estate owner: he buys fruit from growers across Greece rather than farming a single property, which lets him chase varieties and sites wherever they happen to be.
That approach suits his purpose, which is the rare and the nearly lost. Kidonitsa comes from Laconia in the southern Peloponnese and its name derives from the Greek for quince. Vidiano is Cretan, Limniona from Thessaly, Mavroudi scattered across the mainland. Several of these varieties were down to a handful of hectares within living memory, kept alive by growers who had no particular reason to expect anyone would want them.
Karatzas concentrates on cool-climate sites and old-vine plots, mostly in Drama and Macedonia in the north, and the winemaking is deliberately unshowy: the point is the grape, not the cellar. Greece has several hundred indigenous varieties, more than almost any country, and this is one of the projects doing most to keep them in circulation.
