Mylonas "Sunday" 2020

Mylonas is a small winery, producing just under 100k bottle per year. They are based in Attica, Greece.

Stamatis Mylonas and his brothers took the winery over from their dad. Stamatis had studied oenology and chemistry and started experimenting and pushing boundaries. Yet, the new vision for the family winery still at its very centre Savatiano, one of the region indigenous grape variety.

In fact, at Mylonas more than half of the wine production revolves around it.

And indeed they bottle several labels using Savatiano: current vintage wine, late release bottles, they age it in oak to produced yet another label, they add nothing to it and make a natural wine, they let the grapes sundry to produce a sweet version of it, and let’s not forget… they add pine resin to the must and bottled their retsina!

Savatiano is a white Greek wine grape traditionally used as the base grape for retsina wine.

This grape shows a high drought tolerance. Maybe for that it is one of the most widely grown varieties in Greece, especially in the Attica region (Attika).

Because of the association with retsina wine, Savatiano wasn’t often used to produce wine “on-its-own” so to speak. It was either made into retsina or used to cut a blend and produce loose, unlabelled, table wine.

In recent years things have start to change with a few wineries betting hard on Savatiano. For more information about this, read my article about Mylonas winery!

Aidani is a white grape native to the Greek islands of Santorini and Rhodes.

To be precise I should be talking about Aidani Aspro (“aspro” is Greek for “white”) to distinguish this grape from Aidani Mavro,”Black Aidani” (“mavro” is Greek for “black”).

Aidani Aspro is most commonly blended with other grape varieties, often Assyrtico and it’s rarely vinified on its own. In blends, it tends to add a floral character to the final wine with a light Muscat aroma.