Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 38

"I had a million euros. That wasn't
going to buy anything in Champagne."
Laurens Hartman is trudging through the loose, ruddy soils of his vineyard, kicking up
pieces of white, chalky rock, explaining how he, a Dutchman, ended up building a winery
in Amyndeon, Greece. A former publisher in Holland, he'd been obsessed with wine since
university; he and his friends would drive their old 2CV and Renault 4 to Champagne to
stock up on bubbles, then return home to sell them.

"Amyndeon had
everything we
were looking for."
-Laurens
Hartman

38

WINE & SPIRITS

In the early 2000s, he began searching for his own
winery to make Champagne-style sparkling wine,
looking in France, Germany, Australia and South
Africa. Although his mother is Greek, his only experience of the country had been the same as most tourists: as a warm, sunny place for vacations by the sea.
He'd never been to the mountainous interior, where
altitude and continental winds dump snow on the
vineyards every year. When he landed in Amyndeon,
a high plateau two hours west of Thessaloniki, he was
blown away: "It had altitude, history, a sensational
grape variety, snow, rains, enormous differential
between day and night temperature-everything
we were looking for," he says. It even has patches of
limestone.
If northern Greece has been known for any sort
of wine, it's been red, made from xinomavro, and
primarily from Naoussa, where the wines draw comparisons to Piedmont's Barolos. These reds rank as
some of Greece's best, but lately, the north is finding
another strength, channeling its cool temperatures
into nervy, mineral whites, both sparkling and still.
Looking out from a hill above Hartman's house in Amyn-
deon, the plain below is a patchwork of peach trees,
potato fields and barley-decidedly cool-weather crops.
There are vines, too, but it's never been easy to ripen
xinomavro here; this is, in fact, the coolest winegrowing region in the country, and the only one in Greece
to have a PDO (Protected Designation of Origin) for
rosé, implemented back in 1972 to make the best of
all the xinomavro that never ripened to a deep red.
Hartman's hunch was that, with its high acidity
and firm structure, xinomavro could produce a firm,
long-lived sparkling wine. Still, he recalls, "Everyone,
even my MW [Master of Wine] friends, thought we
were stark raving mad." Amyndeon's only tourist
attractions are its bird life and ski resorts; otherwise,
it's largely a sleepy farming region with a challenging
climate for grapes. Hartman and his wife, Annette,
started in 2006 by planting a warm, protected spot
around their winery to xinomavro for still wines, in

AUGUST 2017

case the sparkling wine idea didn't pan out.
They named their winery for Hartman's mother,
who's family name is Karanika, and who was born in
Volos, a town 200 miles southeast, on the coast. And
they began covertly experimenting with sparkling
wine, buying grapes from local growers. In 2009, they
produced 1,000 bottles of bottle-fermented sparkling
wine, and he opens one of the last bottles he has in
stock-disgorged in May 2016. A pale yellow, the
wine smells of crisp pears, juicy and ripe, with some of
xinomavro's earthy tones at the center. There's only
a hint of its age, in a button-mushroom fruitiness,
which turns to lemon meringue and lime blossoms
as it opens, freshening as it takes on air.
He pulls out some of his other variations-the
easy-going, lemony Cuvée Prestige, blended with
assyrtiko; the red-fruited, earthy Brut Rosé; and a
creamy, earthy old-vine cuvée he made in 2014 from
an own-rooted vineyard.
"When Huon Hooke visited, he asked me, 'Why
bother to make red?' Hartman says. Clearly, making a Champagne-style wine costs more time and
money than most growers in this region have, but
Hooke, one of Australia's leading wine scribes, has a
point, Hartman says. "When I talk to people who've
lived here for many vintages, they are very consistent in their description of the climate. But for me,
I've been here ten years, and it's been different every
year; it's like someone's been mixing up the sequence
of events." Getting ripeness before the fall rains is a
challenge, and sparkling wine has been a useful way
to deal with it-for him and for the farmers who sell
him fruit.
Hartman is the only one in Amyndeon making sparkling
wine by the Champagne method, with the second fermentation in bottle, but the region's modern history
with bubbles reaches back to 1971, when the local
cooperative released a sparkling rosé using the Charmat method-the wines fermented a second time in
large, pressurized tanks. With their pale pink color,
foamy bubbles and a little sweetness to take the



Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - August 2017

Contents
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - Cover1
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - Cover2
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 1
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 2
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 3
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 4
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - Contents
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 6
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 7
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 8
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 9
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 10
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 11
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 12
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 13
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 14
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 15
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 16
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 17
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 18
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 19
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 20
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 21
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Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 23
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 24
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 25
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 26
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Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 28
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Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 30
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Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 37
Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 38
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