Edition Nº2 · Drama & Kavala · 12–15 Nov 2026
Five wineries, four days, in a cold corner of northern Greece where that comfortable old lie — that wine has been made here unbroken for thousands of years — simply isn't true.
41°09′N / 24°08′E — the Drama plain
40°56′N / 24°10′E — Pangeon
Falakro to the north. The Aegean to the south.
Look at any wine map drawn before 1980, and this place simply doesn't exist.
The route
Two mountains dictate everything that happens here. Falakro to the north — bald, in Greek — 2,232 metres of cold limestone, holding its snow well into spring. Pangeon to the south, 1,956, hollowed out by ancient gold mines. Caught between them is a flat, freezing basin of dirt where no sensible person would plant a vine. Four of the five stops sit on the map. The fifth is 180 kilometres west, and we'll get to why.
New World is a wine term — Chile, California, Australia — and here it is meant equally literally.
Nobody comes to Drama by accident. It is not the Greece of glossy travel brochures. What you find instead is a flat, bone-chilling expanse of Macedonian plain hunkered under a snow-capped ridge, and a small circle of stubborn men who decided, well within living memory, to bend this dirt to their will.
Forty years ago, this was tobacco land. What exists today was built from zero by men who are mostly still alive, still drinking, and still arguing over how it ought to be done.
It will be cold. In mid-November, the air off Falakro cuts straight through a coat. Leave any soft Mediterranean illusions at the airport.
Northwest Greece. Alpha Estate, and a haul ending in Goumenissa at a dust-blown plot called Mikro Ktima Titos. It felt like an afterthought. It wasn't.
USA Wine Ratings names Alpha Estate Winery of the Year and Red Wine Producer of the Year. We'd love to tell you we foresaw it. Truth is, we were just paying attention.
Drama and Kavala. Five estates and an appellation dossier grinding through Greek ministries since 2017. History looks set to repeat itself.
The trip is set up so that you meet the apprentices before their masters. Day four is why day one happened at all.
One estate today, high on Pangeon. One of the two men who planted it turns up again on Sunday, in his own cellar.
On our last run we stood in a vineyard in Goumenissa, planted in 1972 by a man named Titos Eftichidis. When Titos died, his widow, Angeliki, did not sell. She handed the keys to two winemakers from Kavala — one of them her husband's closest friend for half a century, and when the light fades, those are the only hands that matter.
We were told this as if it were a land registry filing. Just business. Underneath was old-world loyalty money cannot buy.
The estate those two men — Vangelis Gerovassiliou and Vassilis Tsaktsarlis — built together is Ktima Biblia Chora, where our journey begins. An hour and a half east from Thessaloniki, climbing the north face of Pangeon, watching the dashboard temperature fall with every curve.
Gerovassiliou and Tsaktsarlis staked out this hillside in 1998. They came from the same soil — Epanomi, 180 kilometres west, where our trip ends on Sunday — and Gerovassiliou was best man at Tsaktsarlis's wedding. Tsaktsarlis had done his time in Bordeaux under legends like Denis Dubourdieu and Pascal Ribéreau-Gayon. Around Kavala, people grew cheap table grapes; fine wine up on Pangeon looked like folly. Yet the first Agiorgitiko planted outside its ancestral Nemea went into this hillside. Their white blend has been a fixture on every serious Greek wine list since.
Today plays out across a narrow strip of plain where everyone knows everyone's business, debts run deep, and resumes overlap like tangled fishing nets. First, the prodigy who walked out on tomorrow's estate; then the man who taught everyone.
Nikos Karatzas: born in Drama, trained in chemical engineering, completed his oenology in Bordeaux, and was running the cellars at Pavlidis while improbably young. In 2015, he walked away. Karatzas doesn't own a single patch of vineyard. Instead he tracks down eccentric growers across Greece, buying immaculate fruit parcel by parcel. It is the youngest operation here by a decade, unburdened by tradition, and all the better for it.
Bakis Tsalkos trained in Montpellier and Bordeaux, then returned in 1985 — French wife and son in tow — and almost single-handedly invented modern winemaking in Drama. Oenogenesis is his personal statement, founded in 2006: a stone Macedonian manor rooted against the mountain. His son Alexandros retraced the same route to France and back, and today father and son make wine under one roof — navigating the necessary complexities of family dynamics without missing a beat. Bakis's white isn't compared to Château Haut-Brion Blanc out of courtesy.
One estate today, west of Drama: the house where Nikos Karatzas ran the cellars before he walked out in 2015. Yesterday you tasted what he made on his own. Today, the place he left.
Christoforos Pavlidis made his fortune blasting white marble out of the earth, spent years sizing up soil, and eventually laid claim to twenty hectares west of Drama in 1998. The facility is austere, sleek, unapologetically New World — a cathedral of clean lines and cut rock that, in 1998 Drama, wasn't a statement so much as a provocation.
One stop today, at the far end of a long run across the spine of Macedonia — past Serres, around Thessaloniki, straight down to where the coast meets the Thermaic Gulf. A monotonous stretch of highway. You will endure it willingly, because at the other end sits the source of the whole affair.
The source, and the final stop. Vangelis Gerovassiliou studied under Émile Peynaud, the Bordeaux professor who codified modern winemaking. He returned home in 1976, and by 1981 was reclaiming his family's plot on the sands of Epanomi. The soil is marine clay laced with seashell fossils. He is also the man who dragged Malagousia back from extinction, the single most important viticultural act on this itinerary. In 1996, Steven Spurrier ranked him alongside Guigal and Brumont — men who redefined the boundaries of their regions. Almost everything you have tasted over four days flows from hands he trained, or hands they trained. Concluding here isn't sentimentality. It's just the shape of the thing.
Drama has worn its PGI status like an unadorned coat since 1995, building a serious reputation without the ceremonial blessing of a top-tier PDO. The application has been gathering dust since 2017. If it ever clears, it will be the first appellation in Greece where foreign varieties lead the blend — and in a country this protective of its native grapes, asking took colossal nerve.
What bureaucrats are parsing in files was settled in cellars with purple-stained hands before the turn of the century. As Tsaktsarlis noted in the late nineties: a cut of Assyrtiko anchors the Sauvignon, giving it backbone and stretching the finish. The appellation isn't inventing anything. It is codifying what intuition found twenty-five years ago.
This is the route. Not just where the car is headed, but the story behind why we're driving there. Schedules and departure hours will follow. Leave the logistics to us.