Gaia Wines

Gaia is renowned as one of the leading champions of two of Greece’s most important wine regions, the island of Santorini, and Nemea, in the Peloponnese. These are home to two of the most well-known Greek grape varieties – respectively, Assyrtiko (white) and Agiorgitiko (red) – and Gaia has been in no small part responsible for their popularisation around the world. But despite this commercial success, agriculturists Yiannis Paraskevopoulos and Leon Karatsalos, who founded the estate in 1994, remain dedicated to expressing their vineyards’ unique terroir through minimal intervention and natural yeasts. So their wines taste of the sun-baked limestone hills of Nemea and the even hotter fields and volcanic soils of Santorini.

On the island, Gaia’s Assyrtiko vines are still trained using Santorini’s unique kouloura system, where each bush vine forms a basket shape to protect the grapes. More improbably, the state-of-the-art winery here started life as a ‘tomatadiko’, processing the island’s famous sun-dried cherry tomatoes and tomato paste.