Ktima Zafeirakis Limnioa 2016
When I’m in Athens, my friend M and I play a game. We stand in front of the wine shelves at his local grocery and pick out a few bottles with grape names unfamiliar to us. We’ve had some massive failures doing this. Once we got a wine that tasted like liquid perfume soap. That bottle went straight down the sink. Even though it may well be just an enormously bad example of that particular grape, we’re now terrified of it.
On the flip side, we have discovered a number of new (to us) varieties we like quite a lot. While I typically veer towards Greece’s white grapes, I’ve been reading a lot about some of the red varieties that are not Xinomavro or Agiorgitiko. My curiosity has been well and truly piqued by some of them. One, which we found with this wine Russian roulette game, is Limnioa.
Limnioa hails from Thessaly. What the wine lacks in color intensity, it makes up for in flavor and characteristic silky tannins. Limnioa wines typically have an elegant personality with red fruits, sweet spices, and an herbal-floral mélange.
Ktima Zafeirakis Limnioa, 2016
The more I drink from Ktima Zafeirakis the more I fall in love with this winery. Making wine in the PGI Tyrnavos area of Thessaly, Zafeirakis is a Biohellas-certified organic farming, family-run winery. They make two wines with Limnioa, a red and a rosé. Vines, which average 20-22 years in age, grow at 200-300 meters in sandy clay soils heavily peppered with flint stones. The wine fermented in large wooden vats and aged in large oak barrels varying from 600 to 2400 liters in size.
The wine poured a medium opaque cherry and, as advertised, had a bouquet that made up for any lack of color. Intense and rich (black) cherry-berry aromas rose from the glass and mingled with dried rose petals and marjoram. Medium-bodied with 13% abv, medium acidity, and smooth tannins that glided around like the finest silk. More floral and herbal on the palate than fruity, this was a lovely, and elegant wine. I will be going back for more!
I paired the Ktima Zafeirakis Limnioa with seared rosemary and marjoram pork chops smothered in sautéed mushrooms. Perhaps not the best pairing for this particular grape, but I wasn’t hating anything that day.