The Odysseus Of Wine
Comes Home On Friday.

Dear Artisans,

The Greeks did not build their greatest story around a hero who was strongest, or fastest, or best-looking. They built it around the one who kept going. Ten years of storms and monsters and gods actively working against him — and Odysseus still walks back through his own front door.

That is Assyrtiko on Santorini. The vines are ungrafted and over sixty years old, because phylloxera never reached the island. They are coiled by hand into kouloura, low woven baskets on the ground, so the Aegean wind cannot shred the fruit and the morning fog can condense inside the nest. There is essentially no rain. There is volcanic pumice and lava and not much else. And every year, out of that, comes one of the most electric white wines on earth.

Sigalas has been our best-selling Greek white for seventeen years running. Not one good year, seventeen. It is also the most tightly allocated wine we handle from Greece: what little reaches the United States goes almost entirely to the restaurants that made Greek food serious here — Kokkari, Evvia, Taverna. That is who this bottle usually belongs to.

This year there was less of it than ever.

The whole island produced 450 tons in 2025, the lowest on record. Some parcels gave five hundred kilos to the hectare — barely worth putting a crew in the field for. We got an allocation anyway, and we are able to put it in front of you at the lowest price in the western half of the country. Thirty-six bottles. They land Friday.

The smallest crop in memory,
and the fog came back.

Small crops make concentrated wine. That much is obvious, and on its own it is not always a good thing, because concentration in a hot year just means a heavy wine with the acid cooked out of it.

That is not what happened here. Temperatures through the growing season stayed ordinary, with no heat spikes at all. And during ripening the anedosa returned — the sea fog that rolls off the Aegean and sits over the vineyards, which had not appeared on Santorini in three years. Fog slows ripening. Slow ripening holds acidity and protects aromatics.

So you get the density of a tiny crop, arriving at 13.5 percent alcohol, lower than a normal Sigalas year. The concentration did not come from sugar. It came from there being almost nothing on the vine. That is the rarest combination in white wine, and it is why the people who taste this vintage keep going back to the glass.

Hand-sorted on a belt, whole-bunch pressed slowly, fermented in steel, then four months on the lees with regular stirring. Nothing clever, nothing hidden. Pale lemon in the glass, then peach and lemon and lime with chamomile and a lift of lemon blossom behind it, and sage and quince underneath.

The part people struggle to put words to is the texture. There is a real oiliness to it, a weight that coats the mouth — and running straight through the middle of that weight is an acid line so bright it should not be able to coexist with it. Both things are true at once. That is Assyrtiko, and in a year this small it is turned all the way up.

Drink it now with grilled fish, lemon, olive oil and salt, or with anything that came out of cold water. Or put it away. This is a wine with seven-plus years of upside and it has barely started.

Troupis "Fteri" Moschofilero 2025

If Assyrtiko is the hero who survives everything, Moschofilero is what somebody hands him when he finally sits down. There is nothing hard-won about this wine. It is simply one of the most charming glasses of white you can buy for under twenty dollars, and at our Old World Taste Tour a few weekends ago it outsold everything else on the table.

The Troupis family started as nurserymen in Mantinia in the 1970s, selling vines and fruit trees, and did what a lot of Greek families do eventually — turned the wine they were already making for their own table into a business. They still farm only their own fruit, about sixteen acres of it, at 640 metres up in the mountains of the Peloponnese. Altitude is the whole trick here. Moschofilero has a pink skin and an enormous perfume, and cool nights are what keep that perfume from turning blowsy.

Fermented cold in steel, a month on the lees, then sealed under screwcap on purpose, because the point of this wine is freshness and nobody wants to gamble that on a cork. Night-blooming jasmine, rose petal, and a bright citrus snap through the middle. Serve it very cold as an aperitif, or with grilled prawns, or with anything involving lemon and herbs. It is the bottle to buy six of and stop thinking about what to open.

An island that made almost nothing,
and made it beautifully.

Ungrafted vines older than most of us, coiled into baskets against a wind that never stops, drinking half the rain they should have had, on an island that produced four hundred and fifty tons of wine in a year. And what comes out is 92 points, 13.5 percent, and a texture nobody can quite describe. Buy two if you want to see what it does with a few years on it. Buy more if you have ever had this at Kokkari and wondered where to get it. And put a few of the Troupis in the same box, because one of these bottles is for the cellar and the other is for Thursday.

Cheers,

— James Tran

36 bottles of the Sigalas, arriving Friday · the Troupis Fteri is here now · call 650-917-8080, text 650-880-3553, or chat