Wine & Spirits - Fall 2022 - 67

HaRVEST aT VaSSalTIS
aMONG THE KOUlOURa
(BaSKET VINES) OF SaNTORINI
GREECE | SANTORINI
Vassaltis
Vassaltis pushes the boundaries on Santorini, exposing a
stream of fascinating releases.
FOUNDED:
2015
OWNER:
Yannis Valambous
WINEMAKERS/
VITICULTURISTS:
Yannis Papaeconomou,
Elias Roussakis
ACRES OWNED: 50
ANNUAL PRODUCTION:
6,000 cases
ESTATE GROWN: 50%
IMPORTER:
Diamond Wine
Importers, Chicago, IL
Yiannis Valambous was born in london, the son of
a shipper who had bought some land in Santorini in
1986. Valambous didn't think much about it, focusing
on a career as an economist, until his father died, leaving
him the vineyards. Slowly, the vineyards pulled him
in-first he began replanting, then selling the fruit-
though after harvest, that left him disappointed-
" I felt like a surrogate parent, " he says. " So I did my
math and figured out that making wine could be a
very expensive hobby, or, if I put out fifty thousand
bottles, a reasonable business. " He opted for the business,
throwing everything he had into building out a
100,000-bottle winery, planting more vineyards, and
hiring two top oenologists, Yannis Papaeconomou, who
had worked at Sigalas-another acclaimed Santorini
winery-and Elias Roussakis, a Santorini native who
worked in nearby Tinos. The three of them throw off
sparks when they are together, a bundle of youthful,
idealistic energy. " What if " is their guiding question,
which they answer in a series of wines, each unlike anything
else on the island. -T.Q.T.
2018 Santorini Plethora Assyrtiko ($196, 97 points) This
lives up to its name, packing a plethora of flavor in every sip.
The idea was to make a small batch of nychteri, a tradi
tional style of wine made from golden-ripe grapes, vinified
with ambient yeasts and aged in old barrels without topping
up. The result turns out to be somewhere between a classic,
saline Santorini, with pulsing acidity and herbal notes
charged by vibrant acidity, and a Fino Sherry, salty, nutty and
deeply umami. It's a head-turner, like nothing else on the
island today, intense and opulent and structured to age for
many years to come.
2020 Santorini Assyrtiko ($62, 95 points) Valambous,
a Burgundy lover, likes a rich style of assyrtiko, so for the
estate wine they pick a little later than many neighbors on
the island. Fermenting it in stainless steel, they leave the
wine on the lees for months, stirring frequently, to build texture.
The 2020 is a youthful nugget of concentrated flavor,
almost sweet in its lemon-verbena intensity, and chalky in its
mineral grip. Those flavors lengthen over the course of days
after opening, every sip feeling fresher than the one before.
It's herbal, salty, resinous and savory, everything elegantly
aligned, carried on acidity that shows it strength in length
rather than brute force.
2019 Santorini Gramina Cuvée des Vignerons ($138,
94 points) This cuvée came out of the question, what if we
could do everything exactly as we wanted to? Pick exactly
when we want to, and get it to the press really quickly? Working
with a single vineyard near the winery, picked at dawn,
they had the whole bunches in the crusher by 9 am, before
assyrtiko's highly oxidative tendencies kick in. Vinified in
stainless steel and aged for a year on the lees, it's a huge,
vivid wine, hot and salty as a Santorini breeze in August,
with bracing acidity and an almost pineapple intensity. It's
Santorini built for the cellar, where that sweetness will mellow
into a marzipan nuttiness and the salinity will turn briny,
upping the umami into the stratosphere.
F all 202 2
WINE & SPIR IT S
67
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2022

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