On 24 February 2025, Artemis Karamolegos put his name to ground he had never worked. Arktos Elevation Vineyards stands at 700 metres above the sea at Amyndeo, in Florina — the length of the country from the volcanic terraces of Exo Gonia, where his own winery has stood since 2003, and from the canava his grandfather built in 1952. He has carried Assyrtiko north with him, and set it beside Xinomavro. The announcement came with a renewed and widened distribution agreement with Trinity Wines, which now carries both estates.
The ground
Florina is among the coldest country in Greece. Winter temperatures fall to minus 15°C, and summers stay mild and cool — which, for a grape as unhurried as Assyrtiko, is the whole proposition. Four lakes lie within reach of the vines and temper the air around them: Vegoritida, Petron, Cheimaditida and Zazari, the quiet mechanism behind the plateau’s microclimate. The soils are sandy and sandy-clay layers over a limestone subsoil, and they drain freely. The estate has put its money into vineyards at Xino Nero and Agios Panteleimonas, and continues to.
It is the opposite of the island in almost every particular. On Santorini, Assyrtiko gives minerality and salinity, drawn out of volcanic soil and sea air. At this altitude, in a continental climate, the same variety comes forward with fruit and a fuller body. Karamolegos has not gone north to reproduce what he already makes; he has gone to find out what else the grape is.
The winemaker
The family began in 1952, when Karamolegos’s grandfather built a canava to make wine for the house. The winery as it now stands was established at Exo Gonia in 2003, and has spent the years since on Assyrtiko in its several registers, a skin-contact bottling among them. It is as narrow and as deep a specialisation as Greek wine offers.
What drew him to Amyndeo was the altitude, and the question it put to him — whether Assyrtiko could be made to speak in so cool and singular a climate. Xinomavro answered a second appetite: a variety of intensity and character, and, by the estate’s own account, of potential nowhere near exhausted. The venture takes its name from the Greek for bear, the animal of the northern mountains, read here for wisdom, strength and resilience.
The first wines
The first harvest came in 2024. Three labels were drawn from it to begin with — a rosé made entirely of Xinomavro, a Sauvignon Blanc, and Pnoé, a white blend of Assyrtiko at 80 per cent with Xinomavro and Sauvignon Blanc behind it. The Assyrtiko of that first vintage, from vines standing between 650 and 700 metres, runs to 4,000 bottles. That is a small enough quantity to be read as a statement rather than a supply.
Four further labels have since joined them — that Assyrtiko, a Xinomavro red, a Fumé Blanc, and Cuvée Malou, drawn from Malagousia with a little Malvasia. Trinity Wines carries the wines in Greece, beginning in Athens and moving outward; England and the United States are the export markets in view.
What it changes
Amyndeo is Xinomavro country, and Xinomavro is the emblematic variety of the appellation — structured, slow, and unforgiving of a heavy hand. That a winemaker whose standing was made on Santorini should arrive here with Assyrtiko in his luggage is not a diversification. It is an argument: that the island’s variety is not the island’s alone, and that the high cold plateau of western Macedonia can hold a serious white as surely as it holds a serious red.
His stated intention is precisely that — to leave a mark on the winemaking of Amyndeo’s Xinomavro, and to show a northern reading of the Assyrtiko he knows so well from the south. Neither ambition will be settled by a first vintage. Both will be visible in it.
The wines will be scarce for some years, and the ones worth following are always the early ones. For those who would take the measure of a vineyard while it is still deciding what it is, the introduction is ours to make.
