Gaia Wines arrived in Nemea in one piece. Two agriculturists, Yiannis Paraskevopoulos and Leon Karatsalos, founded the house in 1994, and in 1997 it bought seven hectares in the village of Koutsi and built the winery in the middle of them, at 550 metres. The house says the site followed from its decision to plant the vineyard there, so the Agiorgitiko is crushed on the ground where it grew.
Nemea was recognised as a protected appellation in 1971, and its vineyard climbs from 250 to 850 metres, with wide variation in soil and climate along the way. Koutsi sits at the high end of that range, and the house calls it one of the most distinguished subzones of the appellation.
The ground
The soils are poor limestone, the terrain semi-mountainous and the slopes steep, and the site itself keeps yields low. Cooler temperatures and good sunlight bring the Agiorgitiko to ripeness slowly and evenly. The vineyard runs to seven hectares, privately owned, around the winery, and the building looks over the Nemea plain and the valley of the Asopos river, 250 metres below.
Winters are cold and humid, with temperatures that rarely drop below freezing, and summers are warm without extremes. The harvest turns on a long autumn: warm September days, significantly colder nights and dry air. The 600 to 700mm of rain a year falls mainly between October and March, well clear of ripening.
The cellar
The winery holds 3,060 hectolitres and has the equipment to take a grape to a bottle without leaving the site. It works to the ISO 22000 quality standard, with quality control at every stage from the vineyard to the bottle.
Paraskevopoulos heads the winemaking team, with oenologists and agronomists working under him. He holds a doctorate in viticulture and oenology, taken in 1988, and he is a professor of oenology who directed his department from 2016 to 2020. Koutsi is where the company sits, and it has a second winery at Exo Gonia on Santorini.
The grape
Nemea is the largest protected appellation for red wine in Greece and the home of Agiorgitiko, a historical variety with wide genetic variation. Its berries are medium-sized with relatively thin skins, and they carry deep colour and high phenolic and sugar maturity. The two do not always arrive together, and the house’s agronomists and oenologists work on practices that bring phenols and sugars to ripeness at the same time. Under the vines lies a shallow clay layer of 70 to 80 centimetres on lime mother soil of near-neutral pH, low in organic matter as most Greek limestone soils are, and on the hillsides it drains well.
The wine from the top of the slope
The highest southwestern slopes of Koutsi are given to the Agiorgitiko that becomes Gaia Estate, the house’s long-ageing red. After fermentation a long maceration draws out colour, tannin and aroma, and the wine then spends at least 12 months in new French oak barrels of 225 litres, chosen down to the forest the wood came from and the degree of toast. It is bottled straight from the barrel, without filtration or chilling.
About two fifths of the production leaves Greece, chiefly for Europe, North America, Australia and Brazil.
Visiting
The winery is open year round, by appointment only. A visit goes through the barrel-ageing cellars, takes in the Agiorgitiko grape itself, and ends in tasting flights set beside local cheeses and olive oil. Koutsi is an hour and a half from Athens, and the house counts Nafplio among the places a visit is made from.
Who is this for
Koutsi suits a reader who would rather see one vineyard thoroughly than six quickly, and who is content to give an afternoon to a single grape. The setting is a working one: a contemporary industrial building at the top of a slope of trained vines, with bare ridges across the valley and little else in sight. The tasting is guided, and the mood is quiet and practical. The cultural sites around Nemea are close enough to pair with it.
