Avgoustiatis - Ilia, Peloponnesos, Greece

A few months ago, I was invited to a trade tasting of Greek wines.  The wines were from the portfolio of Athenee Importers, while the tasting itself was hosted at the offices of Winebow in Somerville.  I don't get a lot of invites to trade tastings and I don't end up going to most of the few that I'm actually invited to.  I have a day job that generally conflicts with the timing of these things, and, furthermore, it's hard for me to find a tasting that I think might have stuff I can use for this site.  On top of that, I don't really believe in reviewing wines that I've only tasted in a walkaround wine tasting environment.  I think that large-scale tastings are important, but are really only useful for helping me to identify wines that I'd like to spend a bit more time with.  The average person doesn't drink 50 different wines in a night and so I feel like whatever conclusions I draw from tasting in that particular environment are limited.  I like to drink wines that I review at home with food in order to really give them a chance to show their stuff.

It can be difficult to get full bottles to take home from trade tastings, though, so as I said above, I don't usually go to very many of them.  This particular tasting and the organizers behind it (Stephanie Teuwen and her team at Teuwen Communications) did a really great job of helping me get my hands on some sample bottles of really interesting wine that I was able to try there.  The room was full of great producers and really cool wines, but I picked out about a half dozen bottles that really intrigued me and Winebow was generous enough to get me some samples.  Today I'd like to take a look at just one of the cool grapes that I sampled at that tasting, but I'll be covering the other bottles in a future Odds and Ends post.

The grape I'd like to take a look at today is called Avgoustiatis.  Avgoustiatis takes its name from the Greek word for the month of August, Αύγουστος (which I think is pronounced like "avgustos"), because that's the month that the grapes get ripe.  It is found primarily on the western coast of the Peloponnesos and on an island called Zakynthos (which is part of the Ionian islands, where Avgoustiatis is the second most widely planted red grape) just offshore, but Wine Grapes, for unstated reasons, claims that it is likely from the Cyclades Islands originally, which are southwest of the Peloponnesos and just north of Crete.  Wine Grapes also claims that there is a possible parent/offspring relationship between Avgoustiatis and Mavrodaphne and cites as their source the Master's thesis of Mihalis Boutaris, published in 2000.  Boutaris's thesis is not available publicly, but he was kind enough to send me a copy of it a few months ago, and when I checked his research, his findings actually showed that Avgoustiatis and Mavrodaphne were genetically identical at the 8 microsatellite loci he examined.

Avgoustiatis and Mavrodaphne are considered separate cultivars by pretty much everybody, so I emailed Mihalis about his curious finding.  He assured me that the two cultivars are distinct and can be discriminated ampelographically and physiologically and having tasted wines made from each of these grapes, I'm inclined to believe him, since they are very different from one another.  It is curious, though, because his paper actually had six total samples, four of Mavrodaphne, one of Avgoustiatis and one of something called Agustiatico, which he says is a clone of Mavrodaphne.  The sample of Avgoustiatis came from Mercouri Estate, whose wines I'll actually be looking at below.  The samples of Mavrodaphne and of Agustiatico all came from university and national germplasm collections, except for one, which came from Mercouri as well.  The mostly likely explanations are either Mercouri sent a mislabeled sample, or a labeling error occurred at some point during the experiment.  Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any other studies with genetic information on Avgoustiatis, so it doesn't look like we have the scientific information available to draw any firm conclusions.*

I was able to try two different wines made from the Avgoustiatis grape, one of which I purchased locally and one of which was a sample from the show I attended.  The first was the 2005 "Antares" from Mercouri Estate, which is a blend of (I think) about 80% Avgoustiatis and 20% Mourvedre that is aged for about a year in oak.  I picked it up for about $30 from my friends at the Spirited Gourmet.  In the glass the wine was a fairly deep brickish red color.  The nose was fairly intense with aromas of black cherry, plum, sweaty leather, smoke and animal funk.  On the palate the wine was full bodied with medium acidity and medium, chunky tannins.  There were flavors of smoke, graphite, leather, black cherry, cedar wood, espresso and meat.  It was dark and savory with a lot of earthy, funky animal notes to it.  These are a major hallmark of the Mourvedre grape, and I found myself wondering how much of the finished wine's character was due to Mourvedre and how much was coming from Avgoustiatis.

Fortunately, I was able to get my hands on a bottle of the 2009 Mercouri Estate Avgoustiatis, which is 100% Avgoustiatis.  This wine was provided to me as a sample, so I'm not sure exactly what the retail price on it is.  They only make about 2,000 bottles of it per year, though, so it may be hard to lay hands on.  In the glass this wine was a fairly deep brickish ruby color.  The nose was moderately intense with aromas of smoke, black cherry, and blackberry with a little meatiness and a little sweatiness to it as well.  On the palate the wine was full bodied with fairly high acidity and medium tight, grippy tannins.  There were flavors of black cherry, blackberry, spicy plum, smoke and charred meat.  There was a little bit of animal funk to it, but it was really dominated by smoke and plummy fruit.  Having tasted this wine, I understood why the winemaker would think that Avgoustiatis would play well with Mourvedre.  They have a lot of similarities, but Mourvedre seems to be a little earthier and funkier while Avgoustiatis is a little fruitier and smokier.  Both wines were very good, though, and would be outstanding with grilled red meats (especially lamb).

*I'm not really interested in getting into all this again, but I do want to mention to first time visitors that this is one of the biggest problems I have with Wine Grapes (read all about it here).  Much of the information is good, but a lot of findings are misreported or mis-cited by the authors, and I find that when I do my due diligence and follow up on some of the citations, the original paper isn't saying anything like what the authors of Wine Grapes are reporting.  If one were simply reading Boutaris's thesis, the conclusion one would come to about Avgoustiatis and Mavrodaphne is not that they had a parent-offspring relationship, but rather that they were actually the same grape.  I'm not sure how they got to the conclusion they got to given the actual information at hand, but it's turning out to be a recurring problem with the book.

Savatiano - Peloponnese & Attica, Greece

Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Fringe Wine trivia!  Today's question is: what is the mostly widely planted grape in Greece?  We've taken a look at quite a few native Greek varieties here, from Assyrtiko to Xinomavro, but none of them hold the title of most planted grape in all of Greece.  That honor falls to the Savatiano grape, which is planted on about 50,000 acres of land throughout the country.

This may come as a surprise to many people, because it can be very difficult to find wines made from the Savatiano grape.  Most wine shops in my neck of the woods are starting to carry at least one Assyrtiko based wine and one Agiorgitiko, but Savatiano-based wines are much more difficult to come by.  If these wines are so hard to find, then how is it that Savatiano is planted on so much land in Greece?  The answer can be summed up in one word: Retsina.

Retsina is a peculiarly Greek phenomenon that most people either love or hate.  For those not familiar, Retsina is made by introducing pieces of wood from the Pinus helepensis pine tree to the grape must as it ferments.  The resin from the bits of wood is leached into the wine, giving it a very pronounced piney aroma and flavor that, to put it politely, is something of an acquired taste.  Modern Retsinas all have the pine flavor added intentionally as a flavoring component, but it hasn't always been that way.  Several thousand years ago, wines were stored in clay jars and if you had a jar full of wine, you essentially had to drink it very quickly before the exposure to oxygen completely ruined it.  In an effort to keep air out of the jars and allow the wines to age for longer periods of time, some people began to seal them with pine resin, which was successful in keeping oxygen at bay, but which also had a tendency to lend its own flavors to the stored wines.  In the third century AD, the Romans developed the use of barrels for storing wine, which eliminated the oxidation problem and made resin-sealed jars obsolete, but some people had grown particularly attached to the pine-flavors that resin-sealed containers imparted.  Most of these areas were in the eastern part of the Roman empire, around Byzantium and Greece, and that tradition has stayed alive to the present day.

Savatiano is the most commonly used grape for Retsina production, but since it is naturally low in acid, it is often bolstered by other high-acid white Greek grapes like Assyrtiko for better balance.  Savatiano is the grape of choice not because of the quality of the finished product, but rather because it is extraordinarily resistant to drought conditions, which can be severe in some regions of Greece.  The region of Attica (which encompasses the peninsula around the city of Athens), where most Savatiano is grown has long, dry summers with very little rainfall.  It is not quite as arid as the desert conditions on the island of Santorini, but during the summer months, precipitation averages from around a tenth of an inch to less than half an inch between June and September, and many areas only average about 14 inches of rain per year.  Savatiano not only endures in these conditions, but thrives in them.

Most of the Savatiano grown in Greece goes into Retsina production, but there are some who make regular, non-resinated table wines from the grape as well.  I was able to try two different bottles, the first of which was from the horrendously named "My Big Fat Greek Wine," which was apparently started up by the founder of Hellas imports, which I believe operates out of Brookline, MA, where I lived for about a decade. This wine is made in the Peloponnese, just west of Attica, which was this historic home to the Spartans.  I picked up the 2009 version of this wine for about $11.  In the glass the wine was a fairly deep lemon gold color.  The nose was moderately intense with tropical banana and pineapple aromas and a touch of white pear.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity.  There were some ripe apple, banana, pear and lemon fruits, but overall the wine was pretty bland.  It had a kind of banana candy flavor to it that I wasn't a big fan of, and when you couple that with the lackluster acidity and the cutesy name, you've got a recipe for a wine I'm not going to like.

The second wine that I tried was the 2009 Harlaftis White Savatiano from Attica.  I picked this up from my friends at the Spirited Gourmet on closeout for about $9.  In the glass this wine was a pale silvery lemon color with a slight greenish tint.  The nose was somewhat reserved with clean, fresh aromas of white pear and ripe apple.  On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with fairly low acidity.  There were flavors of white pear, watered-down peach and ripe apple with a touch of banana and melon on the finish.  There was a nice mix of white and tropical fruits, but again, the acidity was just too low for my tastes.  It was broad, fat, and boring with an unpleasant bitter tinge to the finish.  Given the range of really interesting white wines from Greece, like Moschofilero or Assyrtiko, it's hard to recommend these wines to anyone.  They're relatively inexpensive, but they're not really even interesting enough to warrant their meager price tags.

Moschofilero - Peloponnesos, Greece

(author's note: I was finally able to get an affordable copy of Konstantinos Lazarakis' outstanding "The Wines of Greece" and have leaned heavily on it for the information in this post)

Looking at the grapes over on the left, if you had to hazard a guess, what style of wine would think they would produce?  My first thought would probably be a light red wine like Schiava or Pinot Noir, and I'd be wrong.  Those are Moschofilero grapes from Greece and, like their pink-skinned Greek counterpart Roditis, they are used to produced a white wine. 

Much of the Moschofilero grown in Greece is grown in the region of Peloponnesos.  We've briefly visiting Peloponnesos before: both Agiorghitiko and Roditis are produced in this region.  Roditis is grown in Patras, at the far north of Peloponnesos while Agiorgitiko is grown in Nemea in the northeastern corner.  Moschofilero is grown all over Peloponnesos and on many of the smaller islands, but the best of it is grown in Mantinia, located just south of Patras and just southwest of Nemea.

One might think, based on the name of the grape, that Moschofilero may have some kind of relation to one of the many Muscat varietals, but it doesn't.  The "moscho" part of the grape name is derived from the world "moschato," which means aromatic, which both Moschofilero and Muscat certainly are.  It is also not related to Gewurztraminer though it certainly can resemble it.  So now we know what Moschofilero isn't, how about we talk about what it is?  It is a genetically unstable grape, meaning there is a lot of clonal variation.  It's kind of like how Torrontés is actually three different grapes; there are similarly three different clones of Moschofilero that make up most of the plantings in Greece: Asprofilero, Xanthrofilero and Mavrofilero (which itself has two different sub-clones with wildly different sugar contents), all of which have different skin colors (aspro = white, xanthro = blonde and mavro = black), leaf shapes, bunch shapes and growing habits.  Additionally, the variants have different pick times and different acid and sugar levels.  Since all of the clonal variants are allowed to fly under the catch-all "Moschofilero" banner, chances are that what's in the bottle that you find is probably a blend of several different clones.

There are two bottles under consideration here today.  The first is the 2006 Nasiakos Moschofilero from the Mantinia region.  I picked this up for around $16 (I didn't get a picture of the label and can't find anything online that looks similar).  The wine had a golden color in the glass and I immediately began to wonder if this was over the hill.  The nose was very reticent with just little bit of honeysuckle flower to it.  This was my first Moschofilero, so I wasn't sure if something was amiss or not, because everything I had read about this wine was extolling its wonderful perfume and this wine was just not there aromatically.  I pressed on, though, and found the wine pretty full-bodied in the glass with high acidity and nice white peach, honeysuckle and lemon curd flavors.  There was definitely a creamy citrusy thing going on here.  It was a nicely balanced wine with the acid really holding the surprisingly full body together.  This wine was certainly not dead in the bottle, but it was disappointing to see the aromatics fade so quickly.  I made a note to buy a more recent vintage and after searching for awhile, I finally found one.

I picked up a bottle of the 2009 Skouras Moschofilero from my friends at Bin Ends for about $14.50.  The color was a much lighter straw color in the glass.  The nose was explosively fragrant with lemon/lime citrus, green apple, and orange blossom.  It was very reminiscent of a dry Muscat or a Gewurztraminer and was much more like what I had been expecting from this grape.  This wine was more light/med bodied with very high acidity (bracingly acidic is the phrase in my notes).  The flavors were very lemony with some green apple, white peach, apricot and honeysuckle in there as well.  It finished with that slightly grapey flavor that muscat is known for, but the finish evolves into a nice steely crispness right at the end.  The wine continued to open up and evolve as I drank through the bottle.  The flavor profile was somewhere between an Rkatsiteli and a Muscat for me with lots of flowery citrus.  This wine was superior to the older bottling and I would recommend that you drink this wine young to fully enjoy its lovely perfume.  I think it is a very versatile food wine that would also be a perfect aperitif that would be guaranteed to get some conversations started at a party.