Like the white wines of Greece, the red wines are underappreciated and perhaps even more obscure. Xinomavro? Agiorgitiko? Hardly household names, but they are Greece’s top red varieties and well worth getting to know, as are others that are grown nowhere else.
“Outstanding quality with amazing value,” Kamal Kouiri, wine director and a managing partner in Molyvos, a leading Greek restaurant in New York, says of Greek wines in general. He’s biased, of course, but after a broad tasting of the wines, I believe he has a point.
“People in the last two, three years are looking for value,” he tells me in an interview. “They may spend $200 on a Burgundy, but for $100 I can give them something equivalent to Burgundy — with high quality and its own fingerprint.” He’s talking about restaurant prices, but if you extrapolate them down to retail, Greece offers a lot of very good wines in the $20 to $40 range, or even less.
Like the white wines, the reds are produced all over the country, from the cooler appellations on the mainland to the island of Crete in the extreme south. Most of the country’s better vineyards are influenced by their proximity to the sea and the mountains, benefiting from their cooling influences.
The greatest of Greece’s red grapes is Xinomavro, whose light color in the glass belies its power and depth, much like the Barolos of Italy’s Piedmont to which Xinomavro is often compared. For me, they can also evoke red
