Naoussa Grande Reserve 2001, Boutari
19th January 2008
Greek wine used to be the stuff of jokes. Whenever the subject cropped up - not often, admittedly - people would screw their eyes shut and make nose-blowing sounds. According to the general consensus, the best you could say for Greek wine was that it was a fitting accompaniment to Greek food.
The chief cause of this derision was Retsina. If you haven’t come across it, this is white wine flavoured with pine resin. It smells and tastes like turps, and while it does have its enthusiasts, so do flagellation, coprophagy and rap music.
In its modern form, Retsina can be traced back to a fit of nationalism that seized the Greeks during the nineteenth century. Believing that their last great epoch was the Classical age, over two thousand years earlier, nationalist Greeks called for the revival of ancient customs and institutions. As a result we must now put up with such annoyances as the modern Olympic movement and the campaign for the return of the Elgin Marbles.
Needless to say, Retsina bears as much resemblance to ancient wine as our steroid-driven Olympics do to the Olympiakoi Agones of 776 BC. The original purpose of the pine resin was not to flavour the wine but to seal its container. The taste it imparted was merely a nasty side-effect; then as now, most people hated it. By the third century AD the resin sealing technique was extinct.
But thanks to those nineteenth-century crackpots, modern Greeks have purposely adulterated their wine with resin, convinced that in some mysterious way the resulting effluent carries the essence of their culture. In consequence their entire wine industry has long been an international laughing-stock.
Thankfully the nationalist hysteria has lately begun to subside, at least in the wine industry. In its wine appellations Greece now uses the French language, and a new generation of its oenologists has been trained in France, California and Australia. As you would expect, the country’s wine has improved beyond measure.
The house of Boutari still makes Retsina, but as it was founded in 1879, at the height of the hysteria, this is not to be wondered at. More importantly, Boutari makes other wines that are perfectly normal, and some that are really good.
This one is from Naoussa, in Macedonia (the Greek province of that name, not the neighbouring country). It is made entirely from the local grape, Xinomavro (“acid-black”), and aged for two years in Limousin oak barrels. It a brownish-red colour, with an interesting leathery nose that reminded me of railway smoking compartments (yes, I am old enough to remember such things) and flavours of cinnamon, licorice and leather. Naoussa was the country’s first red wine appellation, and this “grande reserve” remains the best version anyone makes of it, picking up regular awards at international competitions. I enjoyed it a lot and will be going back for more. $18 in the US, £10 in the UK.
