2022 Pure Santorini Assyrtiko

This is one of the best bottles to emerge from the exciting Santorini wine scene and is representative of today's stylistic approach to Assyrtiko. The 2022 Santorini Assyrtiko is softly creamy and rich with orchard fruit, pastry cream and Golden Delicious apple. The wine's rich texture acts as a sounding board to those pretty fruit flavors, and you definitely get the salty mineral tones that are typical of the island. This is a terrific wine, with good phenolic maturity and balanced acidity, and it promises more years of bottle evolution. Fruit is selected from various vineyard sites and aged in stainless steel with a brief two to four months on the lees. "The grapes come from 120- to 130-year-old vines, so not so old," laughs Director Dimitris Motsos. The PDO Santorini does not allow screw-cap bottles, but this estate has been experimenting with screw caps since 2015 because they believe these are better closures for Assyrtiko. In fact, we tried this exact same wine at the winery with one bottle under cork and the second under screw cap. To no one's surprise, there was a big difference between the two, with the corked bottle showing a more accessible personality and the screw-cap bottle offering a reductive approach, with crisp tropical notes, which mirrors the reductive winemaking approach employed at the winery. To me, the perception of freshness and length appeared superior in the screw-cap bottle. "Our goal is to make textured wines," he says.