IWSC TOP 50: Wine

Santorini’s volcanic, sandy soils are not especially welcoming. While that may make agriculture challenging, it also means phylloxera, the louse that ruined European vineyards in the 19th century, never gained a foothold on the island. To this day, Santorini’s vines grow ungrafted, some for more than 200 years. Those old vines are a defining asset and central to the achievements of Estate Argyros.

Founded in 1903 and now guided by the fourth generation, the estate spans over 120 hectares of ancient vines, cultivated entirely by hand in the island’s singular terroir. Work here is meticulous, with hundreds of man-hours per hectare annually, each vine treated as a unique organism. The basket-shaped kouloura training system, developed to protect grapes from fierce Aegean winds, produces fruit of extraordinary concentration and salinity. It was Yiannis Argyros, who took hold of the estate in 1974, that propelled the family into the world’s wine-producing elite, proving that Santorini’s dry Assyrtiko could be sublime and age-worthy, and that his Vinsantos ranked among the finest, rarest sweet wines in the world.

Today, Matthew Argyros leads the estate with acute attention to detail and a deep knowledge of Santorini’s vineyards. Under his stewardship, a new winery was established in Episkopi in 2015, a cutting-edge facility covering more than 3,000 square metres designed to handle every stage of winemaking with maximum control and minimum intervention. The estate works almost exclusively with old vines because only these can provide the depth, definition and concentration needed to produce wines of real character.

For the Argyros family, winemaking is an act of continuity, a way of honouring the legacy of Santorini’s vineyards whilst shaping their future. In the cellar, there is no single recipe. Each plot is harvested, vinified and aged separately until very late in the production process, treated with the required sensitivity to express its birthplace whilst achieving purity and elegance. Patience is essential: many wines are kept in the cellars for years or, in the case of Vinsantos, decades. Oak, mainly in the form of old and large French barrels, is used to underline the character of a wine, never to create it.

The vines are farmed organically, without pesticides, with each vineyard task done manually, apart from ploughing, which is carried out by mules. The wines themselves are made from Assyrtiko, Mavrotragano and Aidani, heritage grapes shaped by Santorini’s unique environment and now attracting attention from wine lovers and growers around the world. What Estate Argyros produces is an authentic reflection of this singular landscape: wines that balance power and purity, rooted in one of the world’s oldest continuously cultivated vineyards.