Gaia Estate Notios Red 2017

Well it winds from Levidi to Nemea/More than 50 kilometres all the way/Get your kicks on GR66! OK, perhaps it doesn't have the same ring as Chuck Berry's Route 66, we'll grant you, but if you do take that Peloponnese trip and turn off GR66, you'll end up in Gaia Estate's winery in gorgeous Koutsi, Nemea.

It's every bit as pretty as Oklahoma City and, while you're there you can get hip to this gorgeously elegant, red-berried and velvet-lined Agiorgitiko and Syrah blend. Or failing that, you could just come and get your kicks - and the wine - in any one of our shops!

Gaia Estate was established in 1994 by winemakers Leon Karatsalos and Yiannis Paraskevopoulos, who were looking to spread the word about Greece's indigenous grape varieties to the growing international cognoscenti. They opened a winery in a renovated tomato puree factory on a beach in Santorini, which was followed in 1997 by seven hectares in Koutsi, Nemea, in the Peloponnese just off GR66. Their initial production of 9,800 bottles has since blossomed to 350,000 bottles annually. ‘Notios’ is Greek for ‘The Southerner’.

The state-of-the-art Nemea winery sits in Gaia's seven hectare vineyard in Koutsi. Soils are chalky and well-drained and temperatures are cool thanks to the 550 metre altitude and the influence of the sea. The Santorini winery is on the eastern coast of the island, where Gaia's aromatic, oak-aged Assyrtiko vinegar is also produced.

All grapes for Notios Red are hand-picked and chilled to 4C before any further handling takes place. The berries are then de-stemmed and placed in fermentation vats where they are cold-soaked for 48 hours between 8-12C. Selected yeasts are added to prompt a fermentation of seven to 10 days, the temperature never going above 25C, and extraction is interrupted after five or six days. The only stabilisation comes from artificially chilling the wine.

Deeply coloured with intense aromas of red fruit and a sumptuous, velvet-lined mouthfeel. A fine accompaniment to a whole host of foods from light lunches to hefty red meat dinners, but quite outstanding with a lamb stew.