TYRNAVOS, Thessaly

Stergios Papras might be one of Greece’s foundational champions of organic farming but the romance here isn’t in the optics, it’s in the quality.  The winery is somewhat gloomy and utterly utilitarian with no concession made to visual aesthetics whatsoever.  The vineyards are in the middle of an oven-like valley where the heat accumulates and just hulks unmoving over the fields.  And yet, Stergios strolls through the relentlessly flat vineyards with a pleased air about him paying no mind to the oppressive heat.  He snacks on barely formed proto-berries in June remarking with childlike appreciation “acidity!”  This is where the magic is at Papras Bio, an old man with decades of experience still in love with the plants and the craft.  

Stergios works with his family to produce unfiltered, skin-fermented wines like the ones his father remembered from childhood.  We’ve been enamored of these wines since they first landed like 3 years ago and each year they’ve gotten better and better as the Papras family enjoy the appreciation of an American market more able to see in their wines what their neighbors cannot: fruity, mineral goodness that over delivers on value.  Every time.