Agrafa, in Greek, means uncharted, or unwritten. It’s the name of a mountain range in Thessaly, central Greece, so remote that some believe that’s where the name comes from – it wasn’t even documented. I’ve seen it described as wild, legendary, even ‘pure and uncorrupted’. It’s a region known by insiders for its rugged beauty, deep stone gorges, rushing streams, hidden trails and forests thick with spruce, oak, pine and chestnut – the kind of place where you’re more likely to find hard-core hikers than tourists looking for ouzo and suntans.
Kanalia, a village and commune in the north-eastern foothills of the Agrafa, has a population of roughly 900 people. In spring it smells of almond blossom. It was here, by planting, reviving and discovering more than a hundred little plots, many of them abandoned and forgotten, that Andreas Kontozisis, together with his father and brother, founded their winery – originally simply to provide their own restaurant with wine. They worked organically from the start (and they were one of the first producers to get organic certification in Greece). They also believed in the potential of the little-appreciated Limniona, a red variety indigenous to Thessaly and rescued from near extinction by Christos Zafeirakis. So that’s what they grow in their 12 ha (30 acres) of vineyards, along with some Xinomavro, Malagousia, Roditis and Assyrtiko.
Kontozisis works with his partner, Aphrodite (who is half German), and the two of them do everything by hand. Their work in the winery is pretty low-tech: spontaneous fermentation for all wines; small parcel-by-parcel ferments using a mix of concrete, amphorae, stainless steel and old oak barrels; free-run juice only; skin maceration (which varies from just a couple of hours to a couple of months). They don’t filter, letting the wines settle naturally instead, and wines have either no added sulphites or very low added sulphites (added only at bottling).
I tasted their Limniona Sun rosé (which is essentially the wine equivalent of a happy pill) and their A-Grafo Rosé Ancestral, a pet-nat made from 100% Limniona which sees 15 hours of skin contact and completes fermentation in bottle. It’s then aged for 18 months and manually disgorged, and is 12.5% abv.
Reader, I fell in love. It was my first wine of 2025, and it felt like a sip of hope. It’s semi-sparkling (the bubbles like a little daisy wreath of kisses on your lips) and it tastes like fresh watermelon with cubes of flame-grilled watermelon mixed in. It has blood-orange freshness through which runs the dark-red spice tones of sumac and paprika. It’s zipping with energy, but it’s also gentle, like strawberries softening to fat sweetness in long summer sunlight. You could drink this while you watch the sun rise. You could drink this while you watch the sun set. You could drink this by the fire with snow falling outside and you could drink this with your bare toes in a rock pool.
We had it with grilled prawns in herby, garlicky butter. To use a food-pairing cliché: perfect match. But, quite frankly, it’s the kind of wine that would go with anything – it has an intriguing dual nature of artless simplicity and subtle complexity. If you’re looking for more gentleness in 2025, this might be the perfect Valentine wine.
It’s almost impossible to find it on Wine-Searcher – if you put in ‘A-Grafo’ or ‘Karditsa’, it comes up blank, so you have to search under the stripped back ‘Kontozisis Ancestral rosé’, and even then, it finds only a UK retailer. But it is available: it’s imported into the UK by Southern Wine Roads and into the US by Eklektikon – both of whom have very exciting portfolios of Greek wine. Kudos Wines in the UK sells it online for £25 and Smith & Vine in New York sells it online for $29. It’s also available from Oinofilia in Denmark and Supernatural, in Greece, sells the newer vintage, 2022, for €22.
To discover more wines made from the rare, indigenous Limniona, as well as finding out more about its potential, take a look at our tasting notes database and what we’ve said about it in the past.
