Extract from Waitrose Greece V’s rest of the World wine tasting article:

‘More encouraging was our own WFI Wine Olympics, held in London's Vintner's Hall last July, when the Greek team of wines assembled by Aphrodite and presented by Nico walloped the best from the rest of the world by four rounds to two. I'm sure that was an eye-opener for those 125 readers who attended; the fact that Greek wines were judged better than Chablis, Chianti and Rioja wines of equivalent age and price certainly made me look at Greece in a new way. I decided it was time I paid the country another visit.’

Extract from Daily Telegraph interview with Matt Skinner:

‘Skinner's enthusiasm is infectious. When he raves about the fabulous new wines coming out of Sardinia, Sicily and Puglia, I make mental notes to try them. My memories of ropy retsina are (almost) obliterated by his encomium to world-class Greek wines, which use the native grape variety Assyrtiko.’

Extract from; One for the rack Live a little Victoria Moore:

Saturday January 8, 2005
The Guardian:
‘A more accessible - and affordable - trend comes from closer to home. Gordon Ramsay's Ronan Sayburn has always run screaming from the prospect of a retsina tasting but loves the other wines that Greece has to offer. "What's exciting is that they tend to be made from indigenous grape varieties, so there is really something to explore. There have been vines in Greece for thousands of years but the new generation of winemakers do things differently. As a result, Greek wine has come on a long way. The hot, sunny islands make fantastic raisiny, sweet wines as well as dry, clean whites that go well with seafood. Greek reds tend to be pretty heavy, with lots of concentrated berry fruit."
These wines may cost more than you would normally expect to pay. But if you think of an interesting bottle as an experience as well as a drink, they start looking like much better value. You may also have to work a little harder than usual to find these wines - but that's the price you pay for being adventurous.’
Extract from; Find the perfect wine for each hot dip:
Roasted feta with olives and red peppers: ``I've always been a believer in the saying, `When in Rome, do as the Romans do,' and this recipe begs for a fresh Greek white wine. The 2004 Boutari Moschofilero ($17) -- pronounced mah-sko-FEEL-er-oh -- would be my choice,'' Narito says. The wine is a lot like Italian pinot grigio but with a little more weight. If you can't find it, go instead with a nice pinot grigio like the 2004 Santa Margherita ($19 at Beverages & More).

Extracts from; The Wonderful Wines of Greece; (Greek News Weekly):

‘The huge US market has started to show signs of acceptance; In its November issue, Beverage Media, one of the most influential trade publications, wrote that “Greek Wines come of Age” following a series of many articles that have appeared in the American press in the last two years. What is needed is a long-term campaign to inform the average consumer about the “Greek wines of Today”.’
……. ‘USA Today last year wrote that “Greece is the Napa Valley of Europe with thousands of years of history on top of it”.’

……. ‘The timing to introduce the wonderful wines of Greece in the US market could not be better. The wines have great quality; the consumers are more educated and are looking to expand beyond Chardonnay & Cabernet;’

Greek Wine, from Yuck to Yum

Wines have been improving as vineyards and winemaking methods have been upgraded by second-generation Greeks who have studied in France and gone to the homeland.

More than 300 native varietals are grown in the Greece's wine regions -- Assyrtiko, Moschofilero, Agiorgitiko, and Xynomavro are the top four. They're familiar to Greeks but are an adventure for most foreigners. And therein lies the fun.

Estimates are that between 60% and 75% of Greek wine sold in the U.S. is through restaurants, according to Nestor Imports, one of the top importers of Greek wine in the U.S. But as word spreads, more are becoming available in retail stores. Among recent vintages, 2000, 2001, and 2003 were all good years, while 2002 wasn't. Reds enjoyed an especially good 2000, and whites did very well in 2003.

The recordonline.com:

Review of Naoussa Boutari:

"The nose is so great – violets, cedar, sandalwood and eucalyptus – that Dottie said, 'I could climb into this glass.' A serious mouthful of wine, with real complexity, but a nicely restrained finish."
For anyone who is serious about finding real value, we'd say a wine like that is worth a special search.

http://www.recordonline.com/archive/2005/01/02/winwww.htm

Full article from waitrose.com:
http://www.waitrose.com/food_drink/wfi/drinks/wine/0505074.asp
For Andrew Jefford, Greece has always produced classic wines of timeless beauty. So this year, he undertook a mission to the land of Homer to find out more...
Some of the happiest days of my life have unfolded in Greece. Holidays, of course, lift the yoke of responsibility for a week or two, which helps enormously; but maybe... I don't know; maybe there's something more to it.

Reincarnation seems an unlikely concept in these scientifically strict times, but if humankind crosses a knowledge horizon or two and it turns out to be a cert after all then I suspect that at least a handful of my previous lives may have been Greek ones. Those stony, pine-covered hills; that neighbourly yet fractured sea; those dusty, herb-scented paths from hillside village to village; the soft call of the Scops owl through the moonlit olive grove: it all feels, oddly, like home. The home before home. The home my present being has made me forget.

By the same token, of course, I ought to feel a kind of atavistic familiarity with Greek wines. And I do. Retsina doesn't strike me as weird; it's like taking your mouth for a refreshing meal-time walk through the bee-loud pine forests. The best Greek reds have always seemed an effortless part of the great European wine-making tapestry, but even more importantly they're my kind of thing.

I recall drinking Boutari's Grande Reserve on the island of Symi a decade ago and thinking it tasted like an old friend: leathery, stony, thorny, not at all a modern fruit bomb; every drop the blood of the land. Homer's Odyssey, written 3,000 years earlier, is full of wine references, and this one seemed to fit the bill exactly. The “ivy-wood bowl of dark wine”, for example, that Odysseus gives to the one-eyed Cyclops to render him incapable; I felt happily certain, staring across to the Trojan coastline, that this was just what it tasted like. If I was the Cyclops, I'd have overdone it, too.

From the Greek point of view, of course, all this is hopeless. The last thing that they want is for their wines to be associated for ever with holiday drinking and very old books; they want them to be taken seriously in the rough, tough world of international wine sales.

The Olympics, of course, were a great chance for Greece to get its message across, though opinions are mixed as to whether this actually happened. Tsantali's Aphrodite Panagiotalides says that the firm noticed “increased interest” in Greek wine after the games. Wine writer Nico Manessis, by contrast, lamented that there had been no concerted government efforts to link Greece's wines with the Olympiad, and UK-based Greek wine importer George Lemos agreed.

George Lemos had told me that because of Greece's mountainous terrain, its best wines can never be as cheap as those of Chile, Australia or even southern France. As I travelled northern Greece, I saw what he meant. Tsantali's Rapsani wine, for example, is blended from a patchwork of tiny vineyards grafted on to the foothills of Mount Olympus. Every vine fights for a rocky foothold; every sip means hours of hard physical work. The views across the forested slopes and down to the Gulf of Thermaikos are stunning - but the vines don't notice and the farmers have got used to them.

The Tsantali-run vineyards on Mount Athos - 'Holy Mountain' - were if anything even tougher to work, since this medieval monastic enclave has no roads, no running water - and no workforce. Outsiders need a pass to get in, and women are forbidden entry altogether. The quality of every vintage, then, is at the mercy of the sea and the local boatmen, which is how pruners and pickers arrive for work and how the grapes leave.

Greece's best wines, though, are well worth the £5 to £15 they generally cost, as our guests at Vintner's Hall last summer discovered. If I had to give you just two geographical names to remember, they would be Santorini and Naoussa. Santorini is an astonishing white wine produced in the grey-black volcanic ash of this explosive island. The Assyrtiko vines, half-buried and sprawling to offer them protection from the incessant winds, produce a sharp, lemony white with an astonishing mineral charge.
Naoussa's grape Xynomavro, meanwhile, produces those “leathery, stony, thorny” reds that first sent my taste buds tumbling back to Homeric times. If you find all that too poetic, consider that a group of American sommeliers recently concluded a workshop on Greek varieties by deciding that Xynomavro was like “Nebbiolo with a Pinot Noir nose”.

Either way, the wine is often good and occasionally great - like the 1997 Ramnistas Xynomavro from the Kyr-Yanni estate, which I drank with George Lemos and owner Stelios Boutaris last September, looking up to the pine-covered hills, lost in the blue haze of midday. There were all the sloe fruits buried in it that any modernist could want... yet as those subsided, out stole the leather, the stones and the thorns, and the Cyclops in me gave a terrifying, one-eyed wink.