#winesofgreece

‘This is where I found Brett in Greek Wine’ - Cpt Corelli

Brett - Brettanomyces, is one of the yeast genera found occasionally on grapes but more often in wines, especially those that have undergone barrel maturation, cask ageing or in this case, maturation in clay amphora. While some consider brett a spoilage yeast since it can produce some off flavours in wines, there are producers that encourage it to come through. The suggestion is that low levels of brett can improve wine complexity. Isolated compounds of Brett (4-EP) are described as introducing animal and horse saddle flavours into wine. Other compounds (4-EG) produce aromas of spice, smoke, clove, and hint of blue cheese. Of course, the Silva Daskalaki Grifos Rosé is a natural wine. The addition of Sulphur and the process of sterile filtration in normal mass produced wines, removes any traces of brett, and thus some of the more complex flavours in a wine. At 3,000 bottles per year, this wine is really mad by a family of farmers for local constumption. Only the brave (financially) like Corelli Wines, travel to these far out, mountain, boutique wineries to prise this precious product from the makers!

What do you do as a wine maker when you’re closer to Libya than the nearest European country? You harvest at night! Our friends at Domaine Paterianakis in Crete do just that. They carefully select and harvest their grapes in the cool of the night where the grape skins and flesh are firmer, stopping them from being squashed during picking. Something else you’ll notice in this video - all the grapes are harvested by hand in line with the winery ethos, and typical of most wineries in Greece when compared to Northern Europe. All the wineries we work with are boutique, small family run places. So our wines are low intervention, rare, small batch and handmade, making them extra special for our customers at Corelli Wines

We were checking out some sea-aged wines this weekend in Kefelonia, Greece. We went to the famous Foivos winery in Lixouri towards the east of this amazing sleepy island. Theodore - the gentile, happy, quiet master of wine making - showcased all of his wines and we tasted through the ones destined for U.K markets; as decided between winemaker and wine importer through intense wine-fuelled business talks! 😉

Sea aging is a time-consuming, labourious and expensive process requiring divers to tend and check the wines; taking a sample each year for Theodore to try and decide when it is ready. Placed at a depth of 22m below sea level, this is the optimum pressure for the wine ensuring that it is sealed (keeping the wine in!), doesn’t leak (keeping the sea water out!), maintained an almost constant temperature (+/- O.5 deg.) and remains in the dark to avoid UV damage. The result is a truely astounding wine that is lively, vibrant and fresh like a newly bottled wine, but imparts some deeply complex and subtle flavours and notes that hard truely hard to describe. All of these more subtle elements come from the sea aging of course, and your imagination really runs away as you try and decipher the wines code. We noticed some salinity, some flavours of organic sea compounds and fleshy seabed vegetation. You can also find hints of chalk/ calcium from the development of crustations around the bottles as they lie in their cage on the seabed. Particularly, looking at the bottle of single variety Muscatel below, when you have a clam that decides to live on the neck of the bottle for a few years, leave it’s shell attached when the wine is exhumed, you can’t help but think the little guy has improved your wine just that little bit more! 🥺

It is appropriate that from the nation of seafarers with the largest merchant navy in the world, and the country of origin for great tales of the sea such as Odesious’ Odyssey, that there are wines created here in perfect harmony with the sea, the old, reliable, omnipresent friend of the Greeks. Odesious, as the ancient king of Ithaca and modern day Cephalonia, would be proud of his progeny who produce wines today that are fitting for the tables great and ancient kings of mythology!

Check out our website for more of our amazing mythological wines and stay tuned for wine drops of Foivos sea-aged wines at www.corelliwines.com