Sunday Drinking: 4 June

This week I’m drinking a deliciously light Greek red that’s perfect for drinking while engaging in a Socratic dialogue.

- 'So where is Greek wine now?' 

- 'If we were to use an analogy from the Odyssey I would say we could see the coastline of Ithaca but we haven't got round to slaughtering to suitors yet!'

That’s from an interview with Steve Daniel in the latest edition of wine shipper Hallgarten & Novum’s quarterly magazine Assemblage. Unless you’re in the trade, you probably don’t know Daniel but he has undoubtedly affected what you drink. Daniel was head buyer for wine merchant chain Oddbins in the 1980s and ‘90s and first pioneered Australian and then Chilean wines on the British high street. Daniel’s influence on the take up of New World wines over here makes him in my view far more important than Steven Spurrier, the man behind the Judgement of Paris tasting that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.

Steve Daniel looking very at home in Greece

Not all of Daniel’s innovations were so successful, however. I worked at Oddbins first in Leeds and later West London at the turn of the millennium and I remember wine arriving on delivery day that had all of us scratching our heads. The labels were entirely in Greek, not a Latin letter to be seen. I asked Daniel about this nearly 20 years later and the problem was that he can speak and read Greek so he didn’t realise that nobody else would be able to decipher the script. He fell in love with the country in his teens and now has a house on Santorini and part-owns a brewery there. Even when the labels were in Latin script, the wines were still pretty incomprehensible with grape varieties like assyrtiko, xinomavro and agiorgitiko. Compared with Aussie shiraz, Chilean chardonnay and Argentine malbec they were a tough sell especially as they were generally around £10 or over. But they were wonderful wines and great favourites among the staff. I can still remember the shelf talker for Gaia Estate red as ‘sturdier than Robert Mitchum’s trouser press.’

It might have taken over 20 years but other retailers and the British wine drinking public eventually caught up with Daniel. Aldi’s £6.99 assyrtiko was a huge hit last year (there seems to be a new version which I haven’t tried yet). This is the grape that makes steely and pricey wines on Santorini. Planted on the mainland, the wines aren’t quite so distinctive but they are a lot cheaper. ‘Aldi was selling 100 bottles an hour of its assyrtiko last year. Assyritiko has certainly arrived in the psyche of the consumer, helped by Olly Smith in no small way,’  Daniel said. 

Altogether now: a yee or jitiko!

Greek reds haven’t taken off quite so fast but a sample I tried recently from Laithwaite’s might well change that. It’s made from agiorgitiko, which means St. George in Greek and pronounced something like: ‘A yee or jitiko.’ It’s usually used, at least in my experience, to make somewhat sturdy reds like that Robert Mitchum-esque Gaia Estate but it has a lighter side as this wine demonstrates. The winemaker Pavlos Argyropoulos used to be at Tsantali, one of the biggest producers in Greece. The name 14/27 Agiorgitiko apparently comes from the number of people who took part in a symposium, 14 or 27.

At only 12%, it’s just the sort of wine to sip when debating philosophy or deciding whether to go to war with Sparta. I scribbled a quick note while drinking it over supper: ‘Lovely fresh style, cherries, Turkish delight and orange peel. Quite firm tannins, nice bite to it. Utterly delightful and incredibly drinkable. Just polished off the bottle with my father.’ It’s £13.99 a bottle which for a wine of this quality is excellent value. Drink it chilled with pretty much any food and I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. It seems that Greek wine might have reached the slaughtering the suitors stage. 

And finally, the obligatory plug for my forthcoming book, Vines in a Cold Climate. I’ve just had some more advance quotes which is quite exciting. One’s from Andrew Jefford, who is a contender for the best of all modern wine writers, and the other is from Michelin-starred chef Stephen Harris. He’s the chap behind the Sportsman in Seasalter but he also writes beautifully in publications such as Noble Rot, so another one I’m hugely pleased to get:

‘Any success as improbable as that of English wine over the last 30 years comes packed with stories. Henry Jeffreys has winkled them out and tells them with companionable affection. He introduces us to the stubborn, prescient mavericks, dissidents and dreamers who have turned Europe's most resolute wine-importing nation into a source of new sparkling inspiration; we meet the corporate escapees and lavishly feathered investors now scaling up in the hope of sumptuous returns. Jeffreys' entertaining, accessible and skilfully paced book helps us relish the English countryside's delicious new calling.’

 Andrew Jefford

‘This is my favourite type of book.One that tells a story that you knew was happening but had yet to have the pieces put together by a skilful and engaging writer’.

Stephen Harris