Malagousia's trip from obscurity to fame by Tara Q. Thomas "Malagousia is the next riesling," said Yannis Voyatzis ten years ago, as we sat at a table surrounded by plates and bottles. We laughed hard, buoyed by the wine and the ridiculousness of the statement. Sure, it did seem to pair with every dish in front of us– from the sweet shrimp to the earthy snails to feta laced with hot pepper– but there were only about two examples in existence: the one he made for Boutari and another from Domaine Gerovassiliou. Back then, the variety was still a curiosity, a grape that had been on the verge of extinction only 27 years earlier. Now, as one insider toldme, "Malagousia has become the parsley of the Greek vineyards." Tasting good examples, it's easy to see the appeal: it tends to be soft and silky, with a subtly floral fragrance and plenty of fruit. But then again, great grapes are not hard to come by in Greece. Why malagousia instead of dafni, plyto, vidiano or sideritis? "Sideritis: now that's a great variety," Roxane Matsa replied when I posed the question. "Razor-sharp, savory: It's the best white in Greece." But it's not the grape she chose to plant at Domaine Matsa outside of Athens. Rather, when she was looking to augment her roditis and savatiano vines back in 1989, she planted malagousia. "It was Paraskevas Evangeliou, the agronomist for Boutari at the time, who said, "Roxane, Parparoussis has this vine– you must go try it," she recalls. He was referring to Thanassis Parparoussis, a winemaker on the outskirts of Patras with a fondness for rare, indigenous varieties, who'd taken cuttings from the Athens Institute of Vines and Wines a few years earlier. Parparoussis's vineyards, in fact, aren't that far from malagousia's homeland: Just across the Gulf of Corinth is Nafpaktos, where Vassilis Logothetis, a professor of viticulture, discovered the vine on an overgrown pergola. By that time– 1975– Nafpaktos had no wine industry to speak of: After the civil war of 1945 to 1948, the area had largely been abandoned, the vines left to die or go wild. Logothetis took a cutting to plant alongside the 26 other forgotten varieties he'd collected in a vineyard at Porto Carras, a winery in Sithonia on the Halkidiki peninsula in northern Greece. There, a young enologist named Evangelos Gerovassiliou found the malagousia grapes tasty and, after some promising trials, began propagating the vine. By 1982, the Athens Institute got wind of his work and requested cuttings, sending the variety back toward its home, and Parparoussis brought it a step closer. Malagousia turns out to be a difficult vine to control. "In fact, it's a terrible variety," Matsa says. "Do you know that international varieties become international varieties because they are easy to train, easy to cultivate, relatively forgiving? Cultivating malagousia costsme four timesmore than anything else inmy vineyards. The vine grows horizontally, not vertically; it doesn't like to be trained; you have to tie it to make it go into the wires; it's very vigorous; it needs green pruning two, three, four times. It's mid-May and I've been through the malagousia three times already, while syrah, assyrtiko, savatiano not at all." Why bother? "I'm very stubborn; it's also why I was never married. I'm a very bad character. If something is challenging, I have to take it on," she says. And there is an upside: "People likemalagousia. It's a variety that they can recognize. It's like sauvignon blanc in that way: People can taste it and say, 'Oh, that's sauvignon blanc.'With malagousia, it's a little like muscat in aroma, and it doesn't lose its aroma in a hot climate." In this way, it also fills a gap, says Matsa's good friend Yannis Paraskevopoulos, a professor of enology at theUniversity of Athens,who grows a tiny plot of the variety at his estate in Nemea. "[Greek whites] tend to have a lack of aromatic expression, a lack of fruit," he says, calling up savatiano, roditis and assyrtiko as examples. So malagousia– aromatic, recognizable and indigenous to boot– is highly attractive to vintners looking to diversify. Yet in the 1990s, despite the fact that both Boutari and Gerovassiliou were putting out well-regarded wines fromthe variety, few vintners expressed any interest. "Back then, it was sort of dismissed," says Matsa. "At the time it was the fashion to have chardonnay, sauvignon blanc, international varieties." So she began giving away cuttings to anyone who asked. "I figured, what good does it do anyone if you have a variety no one wants? The more people that have it, the more people will ask for it, and themore people will buy it." There was also the real question of where the grape would do best. The two contemporary examples came from radically different places, both miles away from malagousia's original home.Who was to say it wouldn't do well in the mountains of Goumenissa or the peaks of Nemea? Maybe it would take off in the continental climes of Drama. Eventually, more than a dozen growers took Matsa up on her offer of cuttings. There was a catch, though. "You know, when you buy stock from a nursery, they have papers certifying that it's virus-free," saysMatsa. "Well, mine, it's virus-full." This wasn't exactly Matsa's fault, says Haroula Spinthiropoulou of Argatia Winery in Naoussa, who was working for Vitro, the country's main nursery, back in the 1990s. "When we selected plants in Roxane's vineyard, we couldn't find even one plant without virus. But this is not only in Roxane's vineyard: like agiorgitiko, it is hard to find one single plant anywhere without a virus." But while virused material offers its challenges, Spinthiropoulou believes it's only one of the difficultieswithmalagousia. "I think that the most important fact that differentiates the wines is the type of soils," she says, explaining that the variety needs well-drained soil; with its tight bunches and big berries, it's particularly susceptible to rot. "In my opinion," Spinthiropoulou says, "the tendency to plant malagousia everywhere will lead to disaster." Spinthiropoulou acknowledges, however, that when malagousia is good, it's beguiling, describing a "light terpenic character" that the better versions share: scents of rose, citrus fruits, mint and fresh basil. Getting it right is the hard part: If it gets too ripe, it looses any elegance, along with what little acidity it might otherwise sustain. "Even in the cooler conditions of Amyndeon, it has low acidity," she says, referring to a region in far northwestern Greece even cooler than Naoussa, where she is. Nevertheless, she's gone ahead and planted close to an acre of it in her vineyard at Rodohori, high up a mountainside. Instead of acidulating– common practice with the variety– she blends in assyrtiko, which is high in acidity and not particularly aromatic. It's a combination that Gerovassiliou pioneered in the early 1990s, a way to get malagousia's hallmark citrus fruit and floral overtones lifted with assyrtiko's racy acidity. Spinthoropoulou also adds a touch of athiri. Gerovassiliou, who's been working with the vine longer than anyone, believes that clones also play an important part. He's identified three distinct clones, favoring the smallest- berried and least productive clone, but few others have begun to parse the variety, and there are no official clonal selections in distribution. So when Christos Zafeirakis renovated his family's estate in the foothills of Mount Olympus, he hedged his bet: "I made a selection of old-vine vineyards and vines," he says. "Generally 60 to 65 percent of the malagousia consists of small grapes, which give very good acidity; the rest are larger, and give more aromatic wine." But even a careful vineyard selection by berry size isn't foolproof, says Matsa. "I had somewith huge berries, and then I changed the fashion of pruning, and they started producing small berries." The choice of rootstock is also crucial, says Gerovassiliou, who ran trials before settling on 110R, a less vigorous stock than the more common 1103P. But it doesn't work well everywhere. Matsa is holding out for a better solution for her vineyards, based on some experiences she's had grafting roditis to a less vigorous rootstock. "It can be problematic when you graft vigor on less vigor," she says. "It's like having a Porsche engine on a bicycle." Zafeirakis also planted in two different places, one block on clay and another on sandy clay with a high percentage of flint in the soil. He finds it makes a difference in the final wine: "The flint gives the wine an almost metallic character." Regardless the attention he pays to it, the variety remains a struggle to cultivate well. "It is important to protect the grapes from the sun, to keep the acidity and the aromas," he says. "Every day I have to taste its berries– not just from the same vine but also from the same bunch." To preserve the grapes' fragile freshness, he chills them down for a day before pressing, then lets 80 percent of the juice spontaneously ferment in stainless steel. The other 20 percent goes to oak barrels with a portion of the grape skins, and stays there for at least two months. The result is a wine that's fragrant but subtle, like the scent you might catch while driving by a peach orchard, with the soft texture of peach fuzz and fleshy-but-not-sweet stone fruit flavors. It's broader than Argatia's malagousia blend, but still elegant, hitting all the notes that have come to define the variety Neither version quite rises to the heights of Matsa's– a bright, fresh essence of the flowerfilled fields behind her house– or Gerovassiliou's, an opulent satin-textured beauty redolent of peaches. But, as Gerovassiliou points out, "We have been studyingmalagousia for 35 years now." And he continues to experiment and make changes in how he works in the 62 acres he has planted to the variety, finding, for instance, that direct sunlight makes for more muscat-y malagousia (something he works to avoid) and that, with care, the variety can make a hedonistically rich, supple late-harvest wine. "Generally, I believe that the variety is multi-dynamic," he says, "and, depending on the cultivation and vinification methods, can give primary wines, aromatic and delicate, or, with careful work at the vine, full-bodied wines with aromas of citron, citrus and mature fruits," he says. But, he adds, "That demands experience and knowledge of the variety that only few of us have." For the moment, there is far more experimentation than experience being applied to malagousia as it spreads through Greece's vinelands. And the results are varied: Some taste more like sauvignon blanc, others like muscat, yet others more like chardonnay in their vanillin-bolstered ripeness. But while its character is still being sorted out,malagousia has provided a rare point of agreement among Greek winemakers: This is a variety worth a struggle.