Edition Nº1 · the archive
XinomavroWine Lands
16–20 November 2024
Five days across Naoussa, Amyndeon and Goumenissa — the three appellations where Xinomavro grows — in the November after the harvest.
The grape
Sour-black
Xinomavro — ksi-no-ma-vro — means sour black, and it grows nowhere outside Greece. It is difficult enough that people reach for Nebbiolo to explain it: high acid, hard tannin, and a long wait before it gives anything up.
It makes everything. Sparkling white, dry red built to age, sweet red. Somebody once called it the grape of the gods, which is the sort of thing that gets said about grapes, but the range here is genuinely unusual.
The regions
Three appellations, one grape
Three PDO regions in Macedonia, all of them Xinomavro, none of them tasting the same. The grape takes the character of wherever you put it, which is the whole reason to do all three in one week.
Legal PDO boundaries
Naoussa
Strong and characterful
1 Argatia Winery · 2 Dalamara Winery · 3 Fountis Estate · 4 Kokkinos Winery
Amyndeon
Fresh and elegant, sparkling included
5 Alpha Estate · 6 Domaine Karanika · 7 Ktima Kir-Yianni · 8 Vegoritis Winery
How it ran
Saturday to Wednesday
- Saturday morning, fly into Thessaloniki
- Four nights at a small hotel outside Naoussa
- Eleven wineries by car. Close to a hundred wines tasted, a good number of them way older than our kids
- A picnic in the vineyards, dinners in great places that we no longer remember because of all the wine we had there
- Wednesday evening, fly out
The last stop of the week was a small plot at Goumenissa called Mikro Ktima Titos. At the time it felt like a modest way to finish. It turned out to be the thread that connects to the next edition.
Edition Nº2 →