DOMAINE DE KALATHAS
To Kokkino 2020
Cyclades, Greece
A blend of roughly equal parts of old vines Koumariano and Mavro Potamisi, which ferment separately as a mix of whole bunches and destemmed grapes for three weeks, before being foot-trodden and pressed to vats for a year of ageing. A brilliant shade of ruby, the flavours here feel resolutely Mediterranean, with notes of black fig, stones and herbs. A wine that makes so much sense alongside the wonderful roasts of lamb or goat you find in the tavernas of Tinos’s interior.
Koumariano, Mavro Potamisi
ABOUT THE PRODUCER
The wines of Domaine de Kalathas possess an energy that will be familiar to anyone who has visited the Cyclades.
Open to the elements, Tinos is perhaps the most wild and windswept island of the group, and it was the island’s rugged beauty that led Jérôme Binda to move here with his young family from France over a decade ago.
The Bindas’ vineyards can be found crawling amidst a remote, otherworldly landscape strewn with giant boulders, some three hundred to four hundred metres above the Aegean in the island’s east. The old bush vines of indigenous varieties are up to two hundred years of age and grow on their original roots over weathered, sandy granite soils, which lend the wines a nourishing, mineral quality.
Whilst farming is organic, the Bindas go well beyond this, employing elements of biodynamics and permaculture; they are constantly looking at ways to retain water and nutrients in this incredibly arid climate. In the cellar, the focus is very much on expressing the purity of the island’s fruit.
Grapes are picked and sorted with great care, trodden by foot and after fermentation the wines are left to age for as long as is needed to garner the clarity and focus that are their hallmark.
They have a density and length that rival any in the Mediterranean and perhaps most importantly, an intensity which captures the warmth, light and wind of this beautiful place to great effect.