Modern Greek wines make ancient flavors fresh again
The commerce-oriented Greeks created the first truly proletarian culture of wine more than 30 centuries ago. The products of their vineyards were in demand all over the ancient world.
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Nick Cobb, a local restaurant consultant, seems poised to do for the wines of modern Greece what Edith Hamilton did for the age of Pericles. His vehicle isn't a book of popular history, though; it's a website: greekwinemakers.com.
The site is huge and dense with information. You can learn about historic regional varieties, visit winemaking properties, even read about the cult of the wine god Dionysus. There are plenty of craggy Aegean islands, and some craggy winemakers, too. Visitors better have their reading glasses at the ready. The focus here is on text, not graphics, the writing intelligent and Britannica-thorough.
The website isn't Cobb's only contribution to the Greek revival. He has also assembled an intriguing portfolio of wines made from varietals whose names will be unfamiliar to most consumers. As a group, the growers Cobb represents are focused on indigenous cultivars with names such as dafni (pronounced daff-nee), kotsifali (coat-suh-fahlee), and mandilaria (mahn-duh-lahr-ee-ah). No tradition of barrel aging means a fresher style that transparently communicates the lively fruit and soil flavors for which these indigenous cultivars are justly prized. They're food-friendly, a quality that has endeared them to sommeliers around town -- at Oleana, the Red Fez, and Elephant Walk. The wines are distributed through Richard Kzirian of Violette Imports in Cambridge.
Greek wines once represented the international gold standard, gracing the tables of princes and the communion cups of the Orthodox churches. By the 20th century, the production of fine wines had moved elsewhere. Now, a quality revolution among Hellenic producers may yet restore a measure of the wine glory that was Greece.
In some respects, Cobb, 46, seems an unlikely candidate for the job of resurrecting the reputation of the region's winemaking. An Ipswich native, he's the scion of an old Yankee family whose young men went into architecture or law, not restaurant kitchens. In 1992, to clear his head after a divorce, Cobb traveled to Crete.
"I was motorcycling along mountain paths searching for paradise," he says. "I came across a small taverna. The family grew their own vegetables, raised their own sheep, kept their own chickens, and even owned a fishing boat." He stayed for a month. The local wines, he discovered, were extraordinary -- fresh rather than aged -- and with flavors and aromas that seemed totally new.
Back in Boston, Cobb conceived the idea of importing the wines. Three years later, he offered the portfolio to Kzirian. "Nick's report was that quality winemaking was happening in Greece, and not just experimentation with international varieties," says Kzirian. "Nick was on the lookout for growers determined to be true to indigenous grape varieties and traditional methods."
Brothers Sotiris and Lampros Lyrarakis, for example, are greatly responsible for rescuing the native plyto and dafni varieties from extinction.
Cobb is dabbling in some clever marketing on his site, which is partially funded by the membership fees of the winemakers profiled there.
Promotion aside, it's not yet clear whether American consumers are ready to take on yet another emerging wine region. Cobb is sanguine about his chances. "I'm not talking about creating a huge market trend," he says. "Greece doesn't produce enough wine to make that possible. But there's an opportunity here to return to flavors and aromas that have existed for thousands of years. To be able to raise a glass and taste that history is a very compelling experience." Stephen Meuse can be reached at onwine@comcast.net.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
