On 12 November 2025, Domaine Sigalas passed to Kir-Yianni. The wine estate from Naoussa, in Macedonia, acquired the majority shareholding in the Oia winery from a company owned by the Greek shipowner Thanassis Martinos. Kir-Yianni had managed the winery since 2020. Until now its vineyards had stood in Naoussa and Amyndeon, both in Macedonia, and Santorini is the first place it farms beyond them.
What was agreed
The estate cultivates 45 hectares, 17 of them newly planted, in the village of Oia and the land around it, in the north of the island. The link between the two estates began in 2009, when Kir-Yianni supported Paris Sigalas’s vision for Santorini wine. From 2020 Kir-Yianni managed the winery and started an investment plan. The acquisition completes that relationship.
“The acquisition of Domaine Sigalas is the strongest vote of confidence in the vineyard and the wines of Santorini,” said Stellios Boutaris, winemaker and chief executive of Kir-Yianni. The estate has also named the people who will carry on the work: the oenologist, or wine scientist, Sara Iakovidou, and the agronomists Stratos Guillame Xirafis and Kostas Tellis, who tend the vines.
The estate Paris Sigalas built
Domaine Sigalas began in 1991. Paris Sigalas, a mathematician from a Santorini winemaking family, applied the rigour of one discipline to the other. The 1991 Santorini was his first vintage and the start of the estate’s work. In the years that followed, his wines helped make the island’s white wine known around the world. Assyrtiko, the island’s main white grape, makes a taut, salty wine that is easy to recognise, and it reached wine lists far beyond Greece.
The vineyard he worked with is almost unique. Assyrtiko covers roughly 70 per cent of the island’s vineyard land. The vines grow on their own roots, without grafting. Growers coil each vine into a kouloura, a basket woven from its own shoots, which shields the fruit from the meltemi, the strong summer wind of the Aegean. The soil is volcanic. It is one of the few vineyards in the world that phylloxera, an insect that destroys vine roots, never reached, and it has been farmed without a break for more than 3,000 years.
A vineyard in decline
The timing matters. In its harvest report of 2 September 2025, the estate put the island’s entire crop at 450 tons, the third year of decline in a row. In some places yields barely reached 500 kilos of grapes per hectare, the lowest on record. Assyrtiko and Athiri, another white grape of the island, were picked between 8 and 23 August. Sigalas’s own production fell 15 per cent, its third year of decline in a row.
The estate is frank about the causes. Decades of poor farming practice, an ageing population of growers and too few people to work the land are the underlying problems, and the climate has made all three worse. A mild winter left bud break, when the vines first come into leaf, uneven. Southwesterly winds damaged shoots and leaves in the south of the island, and rainfall was half the average of the last 20 years.
Against those figures, the 17 newly planted hectares out of 45 are the most important part of the announcement. On an island where grapes have become scarce and expensive, profiting from the shortage is easier than planting against it.
What it changes
For a decade, land on Santorini has often been worth more as a view than as a vineyard, and water more to a hotel than to a vine. The island’s reference estate has now passed to a Greek family that already makes wine in two other regions. That should prove more durable than a sale to outside capital.
Yiannis Boutaris founded Kir-Yianni at Naoussa in 1997, and the family counts six generations in wine. A younger Yiannis Boutaris, son of Stellios, began his own career on Santorini. The group now has estates in three regions, Naoussa, Amyndeon and Santorini, and the newest of them will draw the most attention.
For anyone who keeps a cellar, the practical point is narrow. The wines will be made by the same people who have made them since 2020, from vineyards now owned by the people who farm them.
Who is this for
Domaine Sigalas suits a wine lover visiting Santorini who wants to taste Assyrtiko where it grows. The winery stands among the vines on the old plain of Oia, and a shaded pergola terrace with terracotta pots looks through the vines towards the sea. Visitors can relax in the tasting area, take a guided tasting of several wines with or without food, or choose a full food and wine pairing menu with a tour of the vineyard. Every visit needs booking in advance.
