Santorini on Screen

I recently received two wine samples from Santorini, and will be posting my tasting notes on them in the next couple of weeks. But for now, I wanted to link up an interesting news item that appeared on Decanter.com last week. They report that “a new film about the Greek island of Santorini has been selected for the Los Angeles Greek Film Festival”...yet another instance of wine finding itself ever more the interest of the wider population, as opposed to just oenophiles.

According to the report, it deals with “a small winemaking community on the island and its battles to stop vineyards being sold off for development.” A link to the film’s web site can be found at the bottom of the Decanter piece and right here.

As an aside, the wines of Santorini--and so much of Greece, for that matter--are very much on the up-swing, and I expect you’ll be seeing and hearing much more about them in the coming years. I’ve had the chance to taste a number of them, and have been very, very impressed with both their expressiveness and food-pairability. (My report for John Mariani’s Virtual Gourmet can be found right here.) If you have the chance, seek them out; they will more than reward the effort.

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Greek Wines in Detail

The other week, I wrote about a Greek Viognier I absolutely loved. That particular wine was tasted for an article I wrote about the next generation of Greek wines for John Mariani's Virtual Gourmet. As summer draws to an end, and as the time is coming to start diving into more complex wines than we typically consume during the summer's heat, Greek wines are absolutely perfect for this transitional season. They may not be terribly familiar to most people, but they are more than worth learning about: Their range of flavor and aroma profiles, unfamiliar grape varieties, and stellar food-pairability make them excellent wines right now.

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Wine Review Wednesday: Domaine Gerovassiliou Viognier 2008

Several weeks ago, I attended a wine lunch and tasting at New York’s Marea Restaurant that featured a number of Greek wines being imported by the excellent firm Cava Spiliades. And like too many people, my experience with the wines of Greece had been limited mainly to the occasional bottle Moschofilero, but beyond that, not much.

However, it very quickly became apparent at this lunch that I’d been missing out: The wines--reds and whites in equal measure--were fantastic: Well-crafted from high-quality fruit, balanced, and supremely food-friendly.

Then yesterday, I had the chance to taste more excellent wine, this time with the legendary Greek winemaker Evangelos Gerovassiliou, and George Spiliadis, the importer and passionate advocate of the artisanal wines and foods of Greece. Lunch this time was at the spectacular Milos, which George and his family own. Both the wine and the food were remarkable.

I’ll be reporting on all of the wines, as well as the food, in more detail in the coming weeks, but for now, I wanted to share the tasting note for one of the single best Viogniers I’ve tasted all year: The Domaine Gerovassiliou 2008, which is not only a spectacular bottle of wine, but also is representative of the remarkable, exciting changes that are happening in the Greek wine world. I cannot possibly recommend these wines highly enough.

This particular bottling starts out notably spicy on the nose, with aromas of charred peaches, smoke, nuts, and the unmistakable perfume of ginger providing lift. The texture, all chewy and glycerine, is balanced out by a fresh acidity that is far too often missing from other Viogniers. (That acid balance, in fact, seems to be a hallmark of the wines brought in by Cava Spiliadis.) Mango and peach, as well as more spice and smoke, define the palate, and the finish remains fresh and mouthwatering, allowing the impression of the wine to linger beautifully.

Over the course of two lunches and some tasting on my own at my home office, I have, rather quickly, become a very big believer in the wines of Greece, especially when they’re made with as much care and attention to detail as this one. What utterly gorgeous wine.

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Interview with UncorkLife.com

Just a quick link on a Monday morning: UncorkLife.com was featured this past weekend on the excellent South Florida Food and Wine blog. Every week, the blog runs an in-depth interview with a wine writer from either their own Floridian back yard or somewhere else around the country, and yesterday's was with UncorkLife.com. Click here for the full interview.

Right now, I'm heading up to New York for a tasting of, and lunch alongside, a number of Greek wines, which are, in my opinion, going to be huge in the coming years. I'll write more about them--and about this lunch in particular--in the next few days and weeks as I organize my notes.

In the meantime, enjoy the interview, and keep an eye out this week for news, columns, and--as Memorial Day is approaching--wine recommendations for the big kick-off to summer.

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News from the World of Wine

Bloomberg.com, in an interesting news item, reports that “France will return to being the world’s leading wine producer this year after losing its customary number-one spot to Italy, an Italian study said.”

The article continues, “France will produce 48.1 million hectoliters of wine in 2009 compared with 46.5 million by Italy and 39.9 million by Spain, according to a study published [earlier this week] by the Milan-based Italian Wines Union and state-run agricultural institute ISMEA.” Click here for the full article.

And in the new issue of the Quarterly Review of Wines, Serena Sutcliffe reports on the ever-improving state of the wines of Greece. She writes that “The innovations and improvements have been startling and these growers and oenologists have been fired with enthusiasm for modernization while respecting Greece’s formidable wine history.” And, indeed, if you can get past the difficulty in pronouncing some of the more challenging grape names (Moschofilero, Xinomavro), you’ll be rewarded with some truly remarkable wines. The full text of the article is available here.

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