Ktima Gerovassiliou grew a hectare or two at a time

Ktima Gerovassiliou is 110 hectares, one single private holding, on the farmland above the shore at Epanomi. The village is 25km south-east of Thessaloniki, a rural place of almost 9,000 people inside the Municipality of Thermaikos and counted as one of the city’s coastal suburbs. Winemaking is attested here for about 1,500 years, and the settlement of Panomi first appears in a census of 1302. The vineyard has the sea 4 kilometres away on three sides, and its west side faces across the Thermaic Gulf to Mount Olympus.

From 1981, on 2.5 hectares at Papamola, Vangelis Gerovassiliou began reviving his family’s vineyard there. He had studied agriculture in Thessaloniki, then specialised in oenology, viticulture, wine-tasting and winemaking technology in Bordeaux, where he worked with Professor Emile Peynaud and joined the team that ran tastings at the French chateaux. Peynaud was also the technical consultant at Porto Carras, and he placed Gerovassiliou there on graduation. Gerovassiliou was the oenologist at Domaine Porto Carras from 1976 to the beginning of 1999.

Porto Carras is where Malagousia came back. Gerovassiliou found the long-forgotten Greek variety there, vinified it, and took the planting from four or five vines to 4 hectares within three or four years. He brought it home to Epanomi, which is why the estate’s own Malagousia is made entirely from a grape its founder saved from extinction. The first vinification at Epanomi was in 1986, at a winery built beside the vines.

Gerovassiliou then added one or two hectares most years and planted them, over more than 40 years, which is how the 2.5 hectares at Papamola grew into the 110 the estate farms today.

The vineyard and the cellar

By hand throughout, certified AGRO 2.1-2.2: that covers every task in the vines, the harvest included, under an Integrated Management System certified to the standard. Field surveys have recorded 28 bird species living in the vineyard. The Greek plantings are Malagousia and Assyrtiko in white, and Limnio, Mavroudi, Mavrotragano and Xinomavro in red.

The winery is three buildings at the centre of the vineyard. The first took from 1986 to 1999 to finish, across five successive interventions, and the reception building that holds the shop, the museum cafe and the teaching hall was completed in 2014. Two underground rooms of French oak barrels, hundreds of them at 225 litres, hold the reds and some of the whites at constant temperature and humidity. The winery is certified to ISO 9001 and ISO 22000.

The museum inside the winery

Gerovassiliou started collecting viticulture, winemaking, bottling and cooperage tools from around the world in 1976, five years before the first vine went back in at Papamola. The corkscrews came later, from the 1980s. More than 2,600 corkscrews, some 18th century, are one of the largest such collections in the world.

The Gerovassiliou Wine Museum holds them inside the winery itself, next to the underground ageing cellar and the tasting room, and the museologist Matoula Scaltsa and the architect Panos Tzonos drew it. Sculpture and other works from the estate’s art collection stand out in the vineyard, the gardens, the herb garden, the cafe and the production areas, so a tour walks past them on the way round.

The second generation

Argyris, Marianthi and Vassiliki joined the estate after studying oenology, management and marketing. Vassiliki leads marketing, Argyris is the oenologist, and Marianthi has begun taking on the management of a business that employs 86 permanent staff, or 130 counting the seasonal workers.

Old vintages are sold through the estate’s own shop in 0.75-litre and 1.5-litre bottles, with 3-litre formats and above released only at the winery, where the estate can control how they travel. Deliveries stop whenever transport temperatures are unsuitable, which rules out July and August. The wines go to Europe, the USA, Canada, Asia and Australia through importers the estate lists itself.

Ktima Biblia Chora at Kokkinochori, near Kavala, is a 48-hectare private vineyard on Mount Pangaio that Gerovassiliou created in 1998 with the oenologist Vassilis Tsaktsarlis, and in 2017 the two of them worked with the oenologist Ioanna Vamvakoudi to build Mikra Thira, the first winery on Therasia.

Who is this for

This suits anyone with a day in Thessaloniki who wants to see a vineyard being worked. The estate is quiet farmland with the sea 4 kilometres off on three sides and Mount Olympus across the gulf, and a tour runs from the vines into the barrel cellar, the museum and the cafe, past sculpture standing in the gardens and the herb garden. Guided tours start at the reception space four times a day, at 5 euro, concessions 2.50 euro. It closes on Tuesdays.