Our spring sourcing trip - Greek wines from Corfu, Cephalonia, and Crete

We spent two days in New York earlier this spring tasting Greek wines from young producers working with indigenous varietals. Robola from Cephalonia, Assyrtiko from Santorini and increasingly from Crete, Mavrodaphne in a dry style we would not have predicted, and a long list of grapes we have spent a few weeks learning to pronounce.

The shop has carried a small Greek allocation for years. It has historically lived in the back of the floor next to the Sicily shelf, and it has usually been an afterthought. We came home from this trip and moved it up to the front.

What changed

A few things changed at once. The producers who poured for us in New York are working at a quality and a seriousness that the American market has not fully caught up to. The wines are honest, the prices are fair, and the personalities behind them are exactly the kind of personalities we like to introduce to customers in the shop.

We tasted twenty wines across two days and we came home with a case of six. Small allocations of all six are on the floor now while they last.

Three to pour first

If you are new to Greek wine, we would start you here:

A dry Robola from Cephalonia, with the kind of mineral pull you usually want a Chablis for. We are pouring it at the next tasting and it is on the floor in the meantime.

A bone-dry Assyrtiko from a small Cretan estate, which is the bottle we hand to anyone who likes Chablis or Muscadet and is ready for a small adventure.

A dry Mavrodaphne, which most Americans know as a sweet dessert wine. The dry version is a revelation. It drinks like a serious medium-bodied red from a region you have not yet learned to ask about.

If you have never spent an evening with Greek wine, this is the year.

That sentence has shown up on our chalkboard, and we mean it. The wines are unusually well-priced for the quality, the food they pair with is the food a lot of us already eat, and the conversation at the counter has gotten a lot more fun this month.

Coming up

We are pouring a flight of Greek wines at the shop in August. RSVP for the Greek Islands Pour. Six wines, three islands, and time to taste at your own pace.

If you would like a private case put together, write to us or call the shop. We will take a few minutes to ask the right questions and then we will assemble it.