486: George Skouras and the New Old World

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[00:01:05] Ill Drink to That, where we get behind the scenes of the beverage business. I'm Levi Dalton. I'm Erin Scala. And here's our show today. George Skouras of Skouras from the Peloponnese in Greece on the show today. Hello, sir. How are you? Very exciting to be with you.

[00:01:34] Very nice to see you. So about 40 years ago, you were in France studying how to make wine. Exactly. That was like the end of the 70s, and I went there to exactly to do things,

[00:01:48] you know, to have some studies in chemistry, things like that. But I became a guy who was involved with the wine. And how did that happen? I mean, what occurred to change your mind?

[00:02:00] Oh, that's a beautiful story. I was in Aix-en-Provence and I had time. That was just some days, you know, just to learn French and to decide what to do. And a friend of mine, a

[00:02:14] professor of Greek letters, asked me to go with him to go on an excursion, you know. So we took a car and we went to Montpellier, Laguidog, you know. And it was like I discovered me.

[00:02:32] It was I was with this small car, a Peugeot 204. And it was like to be in a sea of vineyards. I was amazing. And then we arrived to a small chateau. And then a couple of some friends

[00:02:52] of him, a nice couple. It is like a film. They waited us in the front of the chateau behind a nice iron door. And then they opened the door with all these noises, you know,

[00:03:07] that they're also doing. And after the door, it was the apocalypse for me because that was a winery. That was a chateau with a winery and vineyards. And as I was the young guys,

[00:03:20] these guys, they took me by the hand and they started to show to me how the vineyards are and then what it is, the wine. See all the facilities, the cellars and everything. Then when lunch started, we never stopped. We went until dinner because they were so grateful

[00:03:43] to me to start to ask me, you know, what is the age of your father? Aha, this year, 1929. It was a marvelous. Let's let's pick a bottle of that. What is that and what is that

[00:03:56] and what is that? And I was amazed, really amazed. And then after that, I had no there was not possibility to speak and to you know, I was speechless, like to see like I had to see

[00:04:12] something, the best theater in my life. And two days later, when I arrived in the university, I went to the secretary and I started to see something with wine and I saw the word

[00:04:26] enology, enology, which is enologia. That's a Greek word. And they said, that's me. I'll do that. Mike 10 And you'd grown up in Greece or? I'm coming from Peloponnese, from a city in Peloponnese called Argos, which is next to Nemea.

[00:04:44] I had nothing to do with wine. I had a lot to do with commerce because my father was in the commerce and with a beautiful epicery. And I learned from him a lot. I learned from him to be, you know,

[00:05:03] correct with the people, to give to the people right things, good things and to respect everything in the business. I finished my school in Greece and 18 years old, I went in France for having studies. And 19 years old, I started to do to the wine business. Mike 11

[00:05:25] How long were you in France? I was in France for five years. You know, this, this, I told you about this professor. So this professor was one of my five mentors. Why? Because he called another professor in the

[00:05:42] University of Dijon, Mr. Bergeret. He called him and he told that, you know, there's a guy, Greek, he want to be an enologist. Mr. Bergeret was one of the professors, you know, of the guys,

[00:05:58] start on everything about the enology and science of enology in Dijon. And he asked me, okay, George, you want to really, really, you wanted to know about the wine and winemaking? Yes. Okay. Look at that. There's a big problem because, you know, when you will go to the

[00:06:18] university with your other guys there, you will see that everyone from them, they come from families, they are winemakers, they have vineyards. Yeah. And when I'm speaking and say like,

[00:06:33] I take the pipe and I do a remote pump over, you will understand nothing. So you need to work in the French vineyard. And yes, that's what I did. Five years, I didn't take a break. I was,

[00:06:50] I was working all over in Alsace, in Champagne, in France, all over the France, I mean, Burgundy, Beaujolais, all over. And I did every, every thing I did from nothing to everything. And that was my

[00:07:10] greatest, greatest, greatest school because like that, I became one of them. And that was, you know, for all my life, it was the biggest possibility to see the world of the wine. And I was in love of the wine. That means passion.

[00:07:31] When you think about what was happening in Greece in the late seventies. Yeah. Late seventies in Greece, the wine was nothing. When I came back, it was like 83. And I started to work for a company at Kefalonia. It was like 70 wineries all over Greece.

[00:07:53] That's all. But in the meantime, people like me, without knowing each other, you know, famous people now, Mr. Yoroub Asselio, Mr. Tselepos, Yiannis Paraskevopoulos, Parasigalas, you know, all these guys, we were in the same time having studies in France, in Italy, in California.

[00:08:16] And then we came back and then we started working in several wineries. And then we started our thing and then we met each other. That was the best. And that was the most nice thing happened to the

[00:08:31] Greek wine. Because when we met each other, we put together a beautiful federation and we started to connect, you know, each other and speaking about that and understand that we have to do a

[00:08:46] lot of things and organize our trips and exports. But it was hard times. So when I went in Kefalonia, I was there and I worked on the Kaligas winery, especially doing a lot of wines from Kefalonia,

[00:09:12] you know, the Robola stuff, Mavro Daphne and a lot of other local varieties. It was something very important for me because it was another life to see some other things. I knew nothing about

[00:09:27] Greek varieties, nothing about Greek varieties. And it was a very nice moment to discover everything and to do some good things. And suddenly there, I met a guy, I met a guy, Spiros Kosmetatos,

[00:09:43] a strange guy who wanted to make wine. So I went to see him in his house and I found him with some, you know, some small dummies in which there was a juice of grapes, like kids, you know,

[00:10:04] and some yeast and trying to do wine like that. I said, okay, this is how we make the wine. And we started to work together. He already planned some vineyards and we create a whole winery from

[00:10:24] nothing. This guy was another mentor for me because the guy who teached me how to do everything with nothing. It is always something to put in the mind that I had to do that and then to prepare

[00:10:40] how to do that, you know? And that was, we create this beautiful Gentilini vineyard, Gentilini winery. It was a wine, white, and this one was like, if I remember, much, much more expensive than every other Greek wine. And that worked. People love the wine.

[00:11:04] We started to have beautiful vintages together, harvest together. And that works very, very, very much. Cephalonia is an island and there had been a large earthquake in the fifties. And so what was it like for you when you were there?

[00:11:21] Cephalonia, when I been there, it was an island after the earthquakes, as you say, and it was practically without people in Ireland because after the earthquakes, a lot of people went out of Cephalonia having other business all over, you know, in the States or I don't know where.

[00:11:39] So Cephalonia, it was for me like El Dorado, you know? It was like, oh, what? There is so beautiful things to do here. Argostoli was a town with 1,500 people, which now it is more than 12,000

[00:11:59] people. And, you know, it was really a lot of abandoned vineyards and it was a big challenge for me to see and work with all these people because people, they had a beautiful culture about wine and winemaking. Cephalonia was very famous from the 18th century because in Cephalonia

[00:12:22] there was the famous Vinarius and Vinarius was a winery and a lot of ships came there and took some beautiful wines, especially from Marlborough Daphne and Moscato sweet wines. Because also

[00:12:38] Cephalonia, it was an island, it is an island in which there was a lot of Venetians. It was under occupation of Venetians in the times. So there was all this beautiful, you know, culture about wine, sweet wines and everything. Yeah. And of course, very beautiful vineyards too.

[00:12:57] Ashpiros Kosmatatos, where was he coming from? What was his background that he decided to make wine in Cephalonia when there was very, very few wineries there? Ashpiros Kosmatatos was a guy who

[00:13:10] lived in United Kingdom and he decided to be a winemaker. And first he decided to be a winemaker in United Kingdom. And he tried to buy, unbelievable, 70s, that's 70s. And he tried to buy

[00:13:29] land there, if I remember well. But as he was from Cephalonia, he came back and because he had some land and everything, he starts to do some things there. And also there's a book. He

[00:13:45] wrote a book about that because it was a real unbelievable moment to be two people together and other guys together with us and to set up a brand new winery, really excellent with,

[00:14:02] you know, everything. But he kind of also taught you how to kind of start with no money. Yes. You know, money, it is something, money, you can find money. It's not yours, but you can find

[00:14:15] money. The thing is, and Pius Kosmatatos teached me something, the scenarios. So it was first of all, the scenario of success. And you do your best and you have success. That's the good scenario. And then another scenario, the scenario which is already success, you see? That means that

[00:14:38] you start, everything is okay, but you have to do more and more and more to be really successful. Another scenario, which was very important for me, the scenario of destroy everything and what to do,

[00:14:54] how to think about that scenario to don't go to the jail because you own money and because I don't know what. So these three scenarios, it was a very, very important. It was something which helped me

[00:15:08] a lot. As a young person, Spiros Kosmatatos taught you that there was open possibility that you could set your own thing. And even if you weren't well-funded, you could start a winery and find

[00:15:19] the material in this land where there weren't a lot of people working with wine, even though historically there had been a long tradition. And he also put some goalposts out for you to think

[00:15:30] about long-term what kind of future you wanted to have. Yes, yes, yes. Of course, yes. As you put that, yeah, absolutely. But also Spiros Kosmatatos showed to me the possibility to do things,

[00:15:46] to be other than a wine maker, to be a human being having a lot of different ways of thinking and to be also businessman, which is another thing because after all, it is something.

[00:16:07] That must have been, take some in a way, either foresight or courage to price a white wine from Kefalonia as high as that Robola that you released was. So what was the thinking there? Because it

[00:16:19] ended up being a success, but it was much more pricey than the neighboring wines at the time. Yeah, it was like that. Yeah, it was like that. But a guy in Athens, Vangelis,

[00:16:32] adopted our, he was in the wine business, adopted our efforts. And we had all these high costs. It was unbelievable, the cost of something very high. And he says, okay, don't worry. We will put it in

[00:16:52] the market. And because it is the highest price existing in the market, it will work. And it worked. And I remember it was a lot of people who tasted that wine and it was so clean style,

[00:17:12] beautiful acidity, crispy. Acidity, it was at the time something very difficult to understand because most of the people, they did the harvest at 13, 14, I don't know what, 15 degrees of alcohol. And we had like a 11.5, all 12. And of course, crispy acidities and crispy fruits. And that

[00:17:35] helped a lot. And people liked the wine and the top. It was a clean, fresh, modern expression, which was a new thing for Greece. Yeah, I think it is a style. Greece has all these beautiful

[00:17:51] mountains and the islands and the climate. It is unbelievable, the freshness of the grapes existing there and the health of the grapes also. And that helps a lot to have crispy fruit.

[00:18:08] And of course, having a nice wine after that, because after all, what is a wine? It is an excellent fruit, which the juice of which become a wine. And you have a health for the fruit.

[00:18:22] And if you do what we have to do, then the wine will be amazing. No one had really come in to do a clean, crisper style yet. And you kind of pioneered that in Keflonia. Yeah, that was, we did without knowing what exactly we did.

[00:18:42] When we come back from the break, George Skouros makes a decisive move. You returned to where you grew up. You went back to Nemea. That's coming up right after this. I talk to winemakers all

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[00:20:22] Then you decided to do kind of what Spiros did. You returned to where you grew up. You went back to Nemea. Yeah, actually with Spiros we created another kind of business like a wine club because

[00:20:36] we found that there was a lot of people who loved the wine and who had to have a club and something like that. So we created this club, but I'm not the best for managing that.

[00:20:51] So I took the challenge for the next three, four or five years, but very quickly, you know, I am a winemaker. I am somebody who belongs to the land. I came back to my house, to my region,

[00:21:07] and I took my motocross, a Kawasaki 250, and with my motocross, I discovered the whole thing. And it was big, unbelievable, starting by 600 feet of altitude and go up to 3,400 feet of altitude. Come on, unbelievable. And that was not only Nemea. It took me years and years to discover

[00:21:33] everything, to decide what part of Flounder, what part, what type of microclimate. Because Nemea, it's something really very challenging. There are 17 villages. There are about more than 24 small plateaus between mountains. All those mountains create great differentiations on the

[00:21:59] soil. So we have all the type of the soils, rocky soils, calcareous soils, sandy soils. And another thing, very important, it was the microclimate. Why in Peloponnese do we speak about mountains? I will tell you why. Peloponnese, it's south. South must be higher temperatures.

[00:22:22] When you go to have something near to the top of the mountain, when I see the top of the mountain because of the cooler climate, I say this is the refrigerator to my land, of my land. Because all

[00:22:38] these cool, beautiful colder temperatures go down and that makes very nice conditions for making vinegars and having grapes. That's one thing. The other thing is, Peloponnese, mind you, it's like an island. It is untoured by the ocean, untoured by seawater. And every day, every day, there is

[00:23:02] a lot from every direction, there's winds coming from the sea to the mainland. Those winds go through the mountains and through the mountains they accelerate themselves because of the phenomenon Bernoulli. And like that, we have windy conditions. Windy conditions means no immediate, no immediate

[00:23:26] means no pesticides, no pesticides means healthy grapes. What else? That's fantastic, you see. To discover all that, understand all that, it took me a lot of time. I do this job within Nemea

[00:23:41] 30 years and now I start, because now I have the whole thing to me. Believe me or not, when I started to do my first wine there in the garage of my father, because that was my first winery

[00:23:57] with two, three wine barrels and vending facilities, vending vineyards all over. When I started to do that, I had no confidence in the Aeorheotico grape. I didn't know. So I put a 20% of Cabernet Sauvignon just for give to the wine a guarantee of life.

[00:24:18] But that was the first ever never blend in Greece between a local variety and a cosmopolitan variety. And that was a school after that. Everybody now does that. So that works. But of course,

[00:24:35] in the meantime, I took the challenge to understand better the Aeorheotico and to know exactly what Aeorheotico from where and what village and what plateau or side. It's better. So now we have beautiful vineyards all over and we can do a lot of, we will present new things.

[00:25:01] Nemea is in the Peloponnese, which is an island, which is where Sparta is. It's off and to the south of Athens. And where you went is in the south of the Peloponnese in Nemea,

[00:25:11] which is an area that's well known for red wine. But there wasn't a lot going on in terms of industry for wine in the eighties. In the eighties, it was like the cooperativa and a lot of bulk wine

[00:25:25] and a lot of winemaking for the big guys of Greece and no values. It was everything and nothing. You know, as many people describe us like pioneers, we started to create our thing.

[00:25:43] And that was an excellent example because other people saw that and the other people jumped to that. When I started to do my first winery, my personal facilities at Yimeno, at Nemea, it was

[00:25:58] 1996. And it was the first licensed winery. It was like a fire after that. A fire that brought a lot of wineries into and started to work with the grapes and the vineyards. And believe it or not, all these beautiful wineries, there are beautiful wineries because

[00:26:26] all these wineries from the eighties to nineties and after, they are modern. They have high techniques and high materials, machinery and everything. And that was a good gift for the next generation. But of course, there was something difficult, which is the difficult part. It was the

[00:26:51] divine growers. And it was the how to adopt new systems, how to understand the agroecological, how to change or not the cultivations. Do we have clones? Irrigation? What about irrigation? There's a big, big, big amount of problems. And a lot of the irrigidical grape variety has

[00:27:25] viruses and we have to clean up everything and to remake things. That's problems, but that's challenge too. And I can see that it took a lot of time to understand. And now a lot of young guys,

[00:27:42] younger than me, they start to create new vineyards and understand how to do yields. It's something very important. When there is irrigation, maybe yields go high very quickly and everybody knows that that's not the good wine.

[00:28:02] So the native grape variety in red in that area, in the Nemea is Aguillertico, as you said. And one of your real innovations was that you blended in some Cabernet into one of your Aguillertico, about 20% cab, that became Megasinus and that became a big success.

[00:28:20] And it really broke open some international markets. Right. Megasinus was, as I told you, my first production. Six thousand bottles was my first production. And in the meantime, without knowing what I have did, I discovered that also Megasinus

[00:28:39] was my passport to the exports. Because at the time, Greek wine was a synonym to retina and Greek wine was a synonym to a very bad image. As I started to be in my booths and in expositions all over the world, people

[00:29:00] looked at my wines and said, what? Do you make wine in Greece really? You make retina, guys. I was furious. I was furious. And then starting to say that this is an Aguillertico, which was really very difficult to pronounce, difficult to understand.

[00:29:22] And what is the Aguillertico? It seems like what? It is like a bad, I had the magical world that was Aguillertico and Cabernet Sauvignon. People was like, what? Cabernet Sauvignon? Let's try that. And after that, oh, this is right. This is very nice. You know, elegant.

[00:29:44] And what it is the other Aguillertico? And like that, we started to open the doors of the international market with this wine, with Megasinus. It is not only about Greek wine. It's about the world wine. I mean, for people like me,

[00:30:02] knew the wine in the 70s and 80s. It was a totally different thing than what it is today. Today you have a lot of wineries, a lot of wines, a lot of styles, a lot of... It's unbelievable.

[00:30:19] There is everything. I don't know if it is everything in discipline or not. I don't know what it is discipline to the wine. But first of all, it's business. And business started from

[00:30:32] the United States. When the United States started to sell wine, I remember that it was like 80s. And the wine, when it's business in the United States and liquor business and things like that, and alcohol business must be quick and must have consumption. The wines, it was like

[00:30:55] a 15 to 16 degrees of alcohol, full of color and the big reds from California. And of course, it was very easy to spend the night with a glass of wine. Many, many changes came from then. Now the wines, everybody likes lighter wines, everybody likes the Pinot Noir,

[00:31:25] and I don't know what. And it changed a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. I have to say that people became more educated about the wine. And of course, also the guys, the people, the business guys,

[00:31:41] the salesmen, everybody is educated. And that's very important. Because if you are somebody who sells wines and you have somebody who wants to pick a bottle, you have to understand what is style,

[00:31:58] what you like, and then to give to you the right selection. So this changed a lot of things. And of course now everybody looks for a hundred percent Agheiritiko from there or there or there from the best vineyards. And of course, that's a success.

[00:32:19] You also make a couple of hundred percent Agheiritiko. So how do you find that they differ? Okay, let's speak a little bit about the Agheiritiko. Agheiritiko normally it is thin skins. And thin skins, it's not very nice for having structure. So I started to see a little bit

[00:32:42] having all this experience I had about the Pinot Noir. I like a Pinot Noir. So I tried to give a little bit of massage on the skin, having the Agheiritiko plantations to some vineyards in

[00:32:58] which there are big differences between day and night. And wind also, it's a massage to the grapes. And we saw that the skins became thicker. That was a very nice technique. It took time. I'm speaking like that, but it was like 15 years to understand that.

[00:33:21] And then another thing it is, may I take some beautiful tannins from the seeds? And we started to think about that and to work on that. So our Agheiritiko, it's always based on

[00:33:38] techniques in which, for example, we do Delestage. Why? Just to take some beautiful things from the seeds. But of course, seeds and grapes and skins and pulps must be really very well ripe. If there is this ripeness, then the Agheiritiko becomes so nice because you can take all

[00:34:04] stuff. Agheiritiko has the aromas of every small red fruit existing in the world. You have all these kinds of berries, all these berries and cherries. Agheiritiko loves cherries and the Licheldesceris also on the Agheiritiko. And you have also a very characteristic violet

[00:34:26] on the nose and maybe some carnation flower. That's Agheiritiko on the nose. And the palate, it is smooth, very nice tannins. Tannins can be there easy to be drinking now, but also 20 years later. And the whole thing is to have the right yields.

[00:34:48] And that's something very important. So now we know about yields, we know about extractions, we know about techniques. And of course, we do some Agheiritiko. We have a lot of different wines, but we do St. George, which is a translation of Agheiritiko, years and years and years now.

[00:35:09] Which is for us, it is all I described. You have everything. It is a very gentle and very elegant. Of course, in our winery also there is this philosophy of winemaking, which is we don't

[00:35:24] care about colors. We don't care about a lot of things, which is only technicity. We care about nice fruits and elegant wines. And elegance is for us something very important. The other extreme Agheiritiko we have is the Grand Cuvée. Grand Cuvée comes from high,

[00:35:46] from Asparchapos, more than 3000 feet of altitude. Up there it's cold. And we have kind of maturation over the second week of October, when we finish everything in the second week of September. So up there, because of the very, very cold climate, all these fruits, it's

[00:36:11] like to have your fruits in your refrigerator. It is not red to black, it's green to red. And that's something very important. And of course, acidity. Wire acidity, which is so nice

[00:36:26] to have for this kind of red wines. You can also have a fish with an Agheiritiko like that. And terroir, a unique terroir of deep red soil, which means a lot of minerals and some volcanic

[00:36:46] items. And I'm going to have a walk in the vineyard and the vineyard smells like copper coins. That's also fantastic. We do big skin contacts when we have good ripeness, contacts like 20, 25, 30 days. And suddenly after the press of the grapes, we go quickly

[00:37:12] and our bars, wood, in which we have the malolactic. And then surly for the next year, which is also very nice because Agheiritiko loves to be surly. It's very well protected and it gets a lot of beautiful structure from that.

[00:37:33] So basically what you found was that if you put the plantings in a windier area, you got thicker skins, which helped you with both tannins and with color. And you also found that

[00:37:44] if you put the plantings higher up, you maintained acidity for a grape variety that can have a straightforward fruit and youth. And so you wanted more zip. And you found that by avoiding oxidation

[00:37:55] during the winemaking process, you could preserve fruit and that a leasy character gave you more complex wine. So it's a combination of where you decided to plant, how you decided to grow it, and then what you did in the winery after. HG

[00:38:10] Of course, another factor I told you is yields. Yields are unbelievable. In our Megasinus vineyards, we have yields like 30 hecto hectare. And other vineyards, they are like 50 and other like 100 hectare. It is a lot of different yields. And this is another obscure thing. It is irrigation.

[00:38:37] Yes, irrigation. Yes or not? And how and how much? That's something because some days in Greece, there is some summers really, really, really hot and the vineyards suffered and it's not good for them. Of course, we calculate the stress and everything in the vineyard to have the best.

[00:39:03] And we know that this stress and vinegar give nice wines, but sometimes it is too much. So if there is possibility to have some irrigations, we do. But some excellent vineyards existing on the mountains, it is not possible to have water for that. Others in the plateaus,

[00:39:24] it's easy to have water and maybe there we have a lot of water. It is something very important to all those factors you mentioned to have the right decision for yields. Yields is very important

[00:39:38] for the Aeorheidiko. We know the low yields, it is fantastic wine. And after the 50, it is a little bit scary what kind of wine will be. Of course, Aeorheidiko is very famous also to produce

[00:39:56] everyday wine and rosé wine and a lot of things, a lot of different wines and the styles. And of course, all these, there are market for that. But I'm speaking always from high-end Aeorheidiko

[00:40:09] and how we think to be the Aeorheidiko. And another factor, it is to clean Aeorheidiko from the viruses and to replanting really clean, clean, clean Aeorheidiko, which is also a very big challenge. So when Yanis Paraskevlopoulos was here who also makes wine in

[00:40:31] EMEA, he said it was quite difficult to convince the growers to lower yields because they weren't into it. So did you have a lot of conversations that were a little bit difficult with people who

[00:40:43] didn't want to lower yields? Look, everything is easy to put on the table because everything costs money. If money is enough, then people decide to go lower and to give you other kinds of fruits.

[00:40:58] If not, it's a problem. You see, that's one thing. Of course, when I'm speaking about the Aeorheidiko, I'm speaking about my Aeorheidiko vineyards and what I'm doing with my vineyard.

[00:41:10] But if you ask me if I use all those vineyards, I use for other wines. There's a beautiful team with me and we try to do our best. Kostas Bakasietis was here and he spoke about Aguiller-Ticot and he

[00:41:25] said that all of it's virused and that it's been a slow process to get it cleaned. When you get clones that are clean for Aguiller-Ticot and you plant them, what different characteristics occur? We don't know. All we know is that it's a nice challenge coming.

[00:41:42] Just to restart planting new clones, clean clones and everything. And of course, Kostas Bakasietis did a lot of work about that and I have to thank him. And speaking from the next generation, that will be something very important. One of the things that you did was really identify

[00:42:06] different characteristics of different terroirs within Nemea. And there are 17 different zones of Nemea for wine growing. So what are those and how do they differ? I can tell you about mine. We know that the Gimno zone, our vineyards at Gimno, which is

[00:42:24] a totally different profile of soil. There's no soil, there's only rocks. It's my rock and roll vineyards there. This environment, this terroir gives to us elegance. That's it. It's elegance, balance between the fruit, the alcohol and components. If we go to Kuti,

[00:42:51] it's another type because we have calcareous soils and it is affected by the sea winds over there and the style is darker, not alcoholic, but more rich if you want. Less acidic,

[00:43:10] but really excellent. It's a vineyard to do big and great wines. And if you go to Daphne, which is another place we have vineyards, it is a little bit higher and we have a lot of types

[00:43:26] there of soils, but there is no irrigation and because of that, we have low yields and again, concentration, color, very nice grapes to do big wines. And then we go up to Asprocamos, that's the extreme and I love extreme. And pH like 3.1, very high acidities and crispness and

[00:43:55] skins and wines with a lot of sparkling acidity, red wines. I love them. And we have some vineyards at Malandreni, which is a lower part. It is like 600 feet of altitude and there it's another style. It's more alcoholic, but still with less fruity,

[00:44:22] less fruity, but still with a lot of nice concentration and very nice tannins, those wines. As you indicated before, most people blend a lot of these regions together into their Mayer Red.

[00:44:36] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it is something, this is inspiration for me. It is like to imagine a guy who works with just one variety. That's a problem. But imagine a guy who works with one variety

[00:44:53] in 17 different places and having, I don't know how many different profiles. That's inspiration. Every year to say, Oh, this year, this is very nice. The other is destroyed, but there it is excellent. And let's do that. And let's do that.

[00:45:10] You know, I had some lessons of Courtier when I was in Beaujolais. Courtier is the guy who knows exactly all the vineyards and he takes all the different wines and he does blend. And suddenly the wine becomes fantastic. That's something like that. All these possibility.

[00:45:35] One of the things I've noticed is that Assyrtiko planted in Northern Greece tastes wildly different than any Assyrtiko I've had from Santorini. So obviously there are differences in Santorini, but the difference is much bigger when you get off the island. And so

[00:45:51] in terms of Nemea for Aguillertico, there are differences that you just explained, but is it much different than the Aguillertico grown further to the North in Greece? You know, nineties, it was very fashionable. The Aguillertico had many, many winemakers,

[00:46:11] vine growers, they took some and planted all over Greece. Very few of them, they are successful. Very few of them. And of course the same because I'm a Moscovite guy too. And the same goes with

[00:46:25] the Moscovillero. And I can tell you the Moscovillero, nothing. It is not possible to plant this plant outside of its land. Unbelievable. The Aguillertico of course, but Aguillertico it's a fragile, it's a grape variety who can be destroyed at the last moment

[00:46:47] with just two, three rains at the last moment can be destroyed. So because of the thin skins. So it is not for everybody. And of course to be there like what? 5,000 years? You know that

[00:47:04] in our area, it is an area with a lot of history, the Hercules, there is the travel of Zeus and everything, Mycenaeus and everything. So there's a lot of archaeologists who does excavations and they found seeds, you know, seeds of grapes. And they could calculate that 5,000 years before

[00:47:28] this place had vineyards and wine. Now the Aguillertico it is, I think it is just phenomenal. After a word from our sponsor, we'll arrive at a big reveal, a secret to George's work with

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[00:48:57] the nuanced needs of your wine brand. And you also ferment in stainless steel. Yeah, we ferment in stainless steel. I belong to the generation which really did everything and I will do everything. So stainless steel for us, it was something clean and nice and working

[00:49:52] with that. And the last year we started to work a little bit with the cement and some amphoras just to show what it is and show styles and things like that. Of course, stainless steel, it is the 97% of my facilities.

[00:50:11] And Aguilletico, is that something where you have to be careful about the press wine? With Aguilletico, you have to not care about press. You take what you take and then presses, I personally avoid presses. We know that the best of the best, it is everything free entries.

[00:50:33] I'm doing to all my reds like that. Because I can see in the texture that that's probably true. You don't find the harshness that you might find otherwise. Aguilletico means, starting my world of Aguilletico, it is nice tannins, round wines.

[00:50:55] When you have a lot of tannins, because we did that also, all the guys in the Aguilletico in 90s and later, we did big extractions, big, big things to get the big red wine. And all of us, we became gentlemen with Aguilletico back.

[00:51:21] Personally, I'm very appreciated that it is better with Aguilletico to do just elegant wines and not more than that. I also feel like there's been some good quality cooperage with your wines. I can't imagine that there would have been high quality cooperage frequently used in

[00:51:40] the Maya in the 80s when you got there. Yeah, you know, when we started and we did everything, I knew nothing. I know nothing. I have discovered everything. Let's bring here everything. I brought the different sources of oak existing in Europe. I brought from Russian, Caucasus oak.

[00:52:04] I brought from Slovenia. I brought from France, of course, from the north of Italy and some from Switzerland. And of course, all these beautiful different forests of France. I can tell you that Aguilletico is good with what we call the central massif of France,

[00:52:27] which is the Allee in Nevers. If you do a Limousin or a Troncet with Aguilletico, you can destroy it because Aguilletico is so fragile. When we found what type of oak wood it is for using, then we started to see how to avoid

[00:52:48] all this attack from the wood to the Aguilletico. And we went further and we discovered that to have a beautiful barless, beautiful wood, you have to give to them a lot of time to be drained. So we buy wood, no bar.

[00:53:08] And all the staves stayed out to be drained for four years. Four years later, there is no lignins. There are no problems. The barless can accept this beautiful Aguilletico and respect the Aguilletico because in our

[00:53:24] winery we have more than 1,000 bars and we detest the smell of wood in our wines. The Aguilletico in Grand Cuvée stays 12 months in the oak. The Megastill stays like 20, 22, 24, depends.

[00:53:45] We rock like six months and then when everything gets ready, we go to the bottle and then we wait a little bit. Two years, three years later, start because Aguilletico is fragile, don't like the oxidation very quickly.

[00:54:01] As a grape variety, is Aguilletico sensitive to oxidation in the winery? I avoid oxidation in the winery. Is it hard to avoid it? The presence of the lees on our bars is a very beautiful protection to the fruit of the Aguilletico.

[00:54:20] First of all, when we start, after the marolax fermentation, we take out all the wine and we take separately the lees. Then we bring lees from last year, who have been barless, and we put together and we start

[00:54:34] to stir for a month, just lees, to give to them, to diminuate the power of reduction. And then we re-put the lees in the barless and then we stay on the lees six months. And then we redo this thing after six months.

[00:54:54] Then all this, it is to have a really very, very fine lees, a beautiful amount of them because lees, you know, it's about autolysis. It's about dead cellulose of yeast and those dead cellulose of yeast that give a lot of

[00:55:16] protection on the fruit, as you know, and the wine become fatter. But it is a lot of work, a lot of work. It is a technique I learned a lot in Burgundy. And it is a technique come from the whites. Adamantium Oh, interesting.

[00:55:33] Are they white wine lees or are they red wine lees? Yannick No, no, no, red wine, red wine, it's red wine. Adamantium I see. So you consider that a key, the lees contact? Yannick It is, it is. It is one of the keys, of course, there is that.

[00:55:45] I always say that, you know, the big difference from something to something else, it's just the small details, but all together. Adamantium And what about the aromas of Aguilletico? How does it change over time in the bottle? Yannick Sometimes to me, Aguilletico starts like a

[00:56:03] Bordeaux and going to after years like a, like a, like Burgundy. It is so fine, so clean and clear without a lot of color. It's an adorable wine to have 20 years later. So what you can see it is, it is an evolution of the aromas.

[00:56:23] Of course, all the primary aromas of the red fruits become very different, you know, very like plums and like more dark aromas. Adamantium That's interesting, because I was going to ask you what other grape variety you would compare it to. You know, sometimes people say Merlot or sometimes...

[00:56:41] Yannick Yeah, because of the different styles existing in the vinegars of the Aguilletico. It's also a tricky question, you know, because there's people they say, ah, this is like a Sangiovese. There are people they say, oh, this is very Pinot-like.

[00:56:56] There are people they say, oh, this is very Bordeaux style. Aguilletico is Aguilletico, it's what it is. Depends from where it comes and that's all. Adamantium You make, as you said, the Grand Cuvée,

[00:57:09] which is 100% Aguilletico, and then you make the Megasense, which is the blend with the Cabernet. And you've done verticals of those going back quite a ways. So as they age, what do you see is the difference between those two wines? Yannick Yeah, they both age very well.

[00:57:25] From the Grand Cuvée I had some extreme vintages, 2004 for example. It was a vintage, it was such a cold year. It was a vintage when the grapes arrived to the winery, it was more than 12 grams per liter the acidity.

[00:57:44] It took for us two years to make a malolactic fermentation and to have a diminution of the acidity. And when we finished and we put the wine in the bottles, the wine was drinkable.

[00:57:59] Then we put the wine in the cellar and 2014, some 10 years later, we released the wine and the wine was just marvelous. You see what I mean? That's extreme. That's extreme. Adamantium Tasting your wines, the aging curve, you know, you can do 20 years, seems like, in a bottle.

[00:58:19] Does that seem fair to you? Yannick Yeah. Our Grand Cuvée is Megasense for sure, Grand Cuvée is the Cineros. Now that's another wine we do, it's another blend with Cabernet Franc, Merlot and Aeriético in between them.

[00:58:34] Yes, we have, you know, people ask me how this wine aged and this question was to me some 20 years before. And I said that I don't know. I don't know. I have to spend my life with the wine to understand how it is aged.

[00:58:50] So if you ask me about my last 30 years, I can tell you that my Megasense is super. You can open in 1988, for example, I had one two months ago, it is super. So I'm very glad with that and for me, it was the challenge of my life.

[00:59:10] Adam And interestingly, you make a Solera of Megasense. Yannick You know, for many, many years, it was like for whom we make a Megasense. We make a Megasense for some guys, they have to drink it the next week or for some guys

[00:59:28] to put in the cellar and having that 20 years later. Now, there's no answer. There's no answer. We know how our wine is 20 years later, but there is people, people drink it just the next day.

[00:59:47] And so speaking a lot about that and having this day, Mr. Konstantinos Lazarekis with us, and actually it's a great idea of him. He told us, OK, guys, let's do a Solera, which having a lot of layers of old vintages and

[01:00:12] a lot of vintage, you must show quickly. You have not to wait a lot with a Solera. It's what it is. We create a nice barrel of 1000 liters every year until now we take out the 40% from this barrel to bottle.

[01:00:31] That's like 500 bottles and we put the 40% of the new vintage, upcoming vintage of the Megasinous. Attention, Megasinous, it's a wine we do from two different varieties. It's a wine we vinify differently and we blend it at the last time.

[01:00:52] So when we blend the Megasinous, waiting in our tanks for about a month to be very well homogenized, then we take an amount from that which is already in the barrel to go in another barrel. So it's a double barrel and the wine is ready to be bottled.

[01:01:13] So this wine goes to make our Solera and every 10 years we split our Solera to two new Soleras and it is doing all the protocol of 40% and it is a wine that has a lot of beauty because of all those layers of old vintages.

[01:01:36] When I have a glass of that wine, I spend at least half an hour to smell it because to me it gives the possibility to some vintages to show better and others to hide. It's a meditation wine. Trey Lockerbie What's been the key to growing Cabernet Sauvignon there?

[01:02:00] Yann Terrill There's no significant thing. Yeah, absolutely. Of course, thinking now 30 years later, if I start and restart, that was only Greek varieties, 100% Greek varieties. But there is a lot of local consumption and there is a lot of tourists come in Greece.

[01:02:22] And you know, believe it or not, a lot of tourists, they are in Greece. They love to be at their pool and having a glass of Chardonnay. Trey Lockerbie Because sometimes what I've heard is that the international grape variety sell more in Greece,

[01:02:37] where Greeks want something that is more cosmopolitan, but then the export markets are interested more in the indigenous. Yann Terrill Absolutely. Absolutely. Of course, you have Cabernet Sauvignon from all over the world and whatever. Believe me or not, I don't believe it. To me, it's a dream.

[01:02:55] We sell Chardonnay in the United States. Come on, Greek Chardonnay in the United States. But yeah, that's market. But people look and especially, you know, okay, United States, it's an open market. It is everything.

[01:03:11] We have the best wines all over the world existing here in New York, for example. But if you go to Europe and for example, you go to France and you say that there's a little bit of Cabernet Sauvignon, they say, what? It's not possible to be accepted.

[01:03:28] But if you say that it's 100% Aeorheitico, Mavrotragana, what else? That's very, very well accepted. And of course, that's right. For the future, what we do is, yes, we love to reschedule our portfolio and be back to our native varieties, of course.

[01:03:54] And we have a beautiful vineyard having saved some old varieties from Peloponnese. We work on them. We have a beautiful one, which is the Mavrosti for Argus. We work with that the last eight years. I think that it's a singing wine.

[01:04:14] We will love to see that in the future. And that's a red wine. It's a red wine. Is that a full-bodied red wine or? Mavrosti means Mavro black and Stifo sour. And it is like that. We started to make a red wine. It was not, it was undrinkable.

[01:04:34] A lot of tannins, unbelievable. And then I said, OK, let's do something like a Ricciotto or like a Namarone. And believe it or not, we have a wine full of body, unbelievable red color. And very nice tannins and beautiful sugars.

[01:04:58] Because we do, we started to do because we didn't know all the different styles of winemaking to make a red sweet wine. So we started to dry our grapes under the sun, to dry the grapes under the shade,

[01:05:17] dry in special rooms for that, to create, to make a wine like a Port. So every year we do something different. And now we know that the best style is the style we created the last two years, which is almost a Ricciotto style. Oh, interesting.

[01:05:37] And then you also make Moschofilo. Oh yeah, that's my other love. I love Moschofilo. I feel just grateful to have this variety in the central of Peloponnese. Central of Peloponnese, it is a cold area, a plateau magical at about 2200 feet of altitude. Homogenized plateau.

[01:05:59] You have not, it's not like the Mayan. There's typicity. You have every Moschofilo existing there and you understand that's a Moschofilo. Moschofilo grape variety, it's famous for the aromatics. So for, you know, white flower and rose petals and violet a little bit, just a hint of mint

[01:06:25] and of course, some citrusy, you know, some sweet lemon. Okay. Normally, if you smell a glass of Moschofilo, you feel like you will have an almost sweet wine, you know, but no, Moschofilo has an unbelievable acidity and freshness.

[01:06:47] It is a refreshing wine, you know, in the afternoon of a beautiful summer day, you know, very well chilled. It's fantastic for having that with fruits like that, with seafood. It's our companion. And of course, Moschofilo is something which because of that, it is very acceptable from

[01:07:11] the international markets. People like to have something like that. It's crisp, it's aromatic. It is what it is. Moschofilo, it is famous to have like white wine, some rosé, but very, very light rosé also.

[01:07:30] And yes, I started in 1989 with the Moschofilo and I create without knowing my first gray wine. It was my first harvest winemaking. So we had some strikes of electricity. So the electricity thing and suddenly my first night of my first vintage of my first winemaking,

[01:07:58] I was out of electricity and I was furious. Unbelievable. And then the grapes stayed in the press, some of them, some of them in their casks, you know, and next day when the electricity was back, we just pressed.

[01:08:15] And we had a white and wine with a little bit of color, but an unbelievable wine. What aromatics was those? Unbelievable. We knew by that that we need a little bit of skin color.

[01:08:30] So what we do now is to bring our beautiful Moschofilo and put in the refrigerator for 24 hours and take them very cold and then press them. Put in the press and then in the press what we do, it is we have without any movement,

[01:08:51] any movement of the press. We just feel the press and then we wait for about two, three, four hours. It depends. It depends on the color, from the maturity and everything. And then we open the press and we take just the free running juice, which is like a 50

[01:09:09] to 54 percent. And this is white. And we love that stuff. We do low temperature fermentations, you know, easy to do and very quickly, about things from January, February, very quickly. The wine, it is very nice to have fresh two, three years and that's all.

[01:09:32] And you work with a biotype of Moschofilo where it's a little darker color on the grape. Oh, yes. If you walk in the vineyard and you see the Moschofilo grapes, you will see a lot of different

[01:09:46] colors and you realize that these are some clones of Moschofilo, but nobody had the time to, you know, to analyze them, to give a tipici to them. So we knew that a kind of that, and I will explain what, it was very different to others.

[01:10:07] So all those clones, they are named after the color they have on the grape skins. So we have the Asprophiloro for the white Moschofilo, the Coquinofilo for the red Moschofilo, the Xanthofilo for the blonde Moschofilo, many others. And you have the Mavrofilo. Hmm.

[01:10:30] The Mavrofilo, we knew that it is something very nice with nice aromas and nice minerality. So what we did in 2004, we created a vineyard just by choosing from other vineyards, just the Mavrofilo. And we created that, you know, in a primary way.

[01:10:55] But we work a lot and we have a beautiful, like 95% of Mavrofilo in this vineyard. And we started. And we did some wine. We call that the Salto. And this wine, we work on wild yeast. Why? Because the wild yeast in white wine give a lot of creaminess.

[01:11:22] And this Moschofilo, it's only 11 to 12 degrees of alcohol and a lot of acid in them. The creaminess is something very important. Gives the wine some, you know, some nice presence. So we try to work on the wild yeast and upon to the first five degrees of alcohol.

[01:11:46] And then we inoculate other yeasts from the same vineyard. You see? We have two inoculations. One wild yeast from the same vineyard and another Saccharomyces from the same vineyard. And there is a saltiness under the tongue to the wine.

[01:12:06] How do you see the Greek wine industry showing in 20 years from now? With a lot of life, you know, a lot of beautiful wines, young guys, a lot of... For me, Greece is still an El Dorado.

[01:12:20] It's still something I believe that in the Greek terroir, there are a lot of values. Because, you know, land, it is something difficult. Needs real people to work. And this is a little bit tricky, you know. So if people, they take the decision to work with their land,

[01:12:43] I'm sure that we will have a lot of beautiful wine in Greece. You mentioned something interesting to me, which was that in light of the financial crisis, there's been many more wineries created in Greece, which is not what I would have assumed.

[01:12:59] But it's the case by quite a bit in terms of numbers. Yeah. What happens suddenly? Suddenly there's an economical crisis and what are you doing? You go back to your land that's in Greece. You know, in Greece by 80s, it was like 70 wineries all over Greece. That's all.

[01:13:20] And then 2008, it was 500. And from then to now, it is 1030. Now. Why? Because people comes back. Because people find that there's another way to make money and, you know, survive. And people come back to their land. I love to see families who own grapes, who own vines.

[01:13:50] And one of their kids will be an oenologist and a winemaker. And then the other, I don't know what, marketing or whatever. And all together try to have a model like 30, 40, 50,000 bottles and make money with that. The better it comes. I believe to that.

[01:14:11] And I believe that you have to be enough to create style and to give to our country the name a wine country. Because, you know, the number of the wineries is something crucial. It is something very important.

[01:14:28] We, the, let's say, pioneers of this generation, we try to work on that and to give to the new generation better conditions than we had. That's it. George Skouras found a Eldorado in Greece as a young man, and he thinks it's still available.

[01:14:48] Thank you very much for being here. Thank you very much, Levi. George Skouras of the Skouras Winery in Greece. All Drink to That is hosted and produced by myself, Levi Dalton. Aaron Scala has contributed original pieces. Editorial assistance has been provided by Bill Kimsey.

[01:15:05] The show music was performed and composed by Rob Moose and Thomas Bartlett. Show artwork by Alicia Tanoian. T-shirts, sweatshirts, coffee mugs, and so much more, including show stickers, notebooks, and even gift wrap are available for sale if you check the show website alldrinktothatpod.com.

[01:15:22] That's I-L-L drink to that P-O-D dot com, which is the same place you'd go to sign up for our email list or to make one of the crucially important donations that help keep this show operating. You can donate from anywhere using PayPal or Stripe on the show website.

[01:15:40] Remember to hit subscribe or to follow this show in your favorite podcast app, please. That's super important to see every episode, and thank you for listening. It is like the famous Syrah and Vionnet, you know? Most of the people think that

[01:16:13] we have to put just a Syrah and Vionnet, and no, it's not that. It's not that at all. Syrah and Vionnet was like the lease of the Vionnet went to the Syrah, and people,

[01:16:25] year by year, they thought, they think that the Syrah didn't lose the color. It was much, much better for that, and that comes with a lease. A lease is something very important.