Tselepos, Canava Chrissou, Laoudia, Single Vineyard, Santorini, Aegean Islands, Greece 2018

If you follow our Best In Show selection every year, you will already be familiar with the extraordinary Assyrtico-based wines of Santorini, combining almost piercing varietal style with some of the most marked terroir-derived characters you will find anywhere: repeated winners in the past. Now, meet something different: a single-vineyard Santorini with more maturity of fruit, longer ageing and the mellower, less reductive impact which amphora can bring in place of stainless steel. Muted lemon and green-olive scents mingle with that warm strangeness which seems to derive from the island’s pumice and ash soils; on the palate, the wine is concentrated, rich, arresting…and dripping with those same flavours of lemon and green olive, and that a bitter stony warmth.

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