Kamara Pet Nat

Winemaker: Dimitrios Kioutsoukis

Appellation: Macedonia, Greece

Grape Varieties: Xinomavro-Malagousia-Assyrtiko

History of the label: In 2017 my two daughters got married. They asked me to make a good sparkling wine for their marriages. In this time I had a fermenting must of Xinomavro. So I put into some bottles a little bit of the must and the rest I filled it with Nimbus Albus of the past year. And so this wine begun its journey…

Vinification Method: After halting primary fermentation, we brought the blend of Assyrtiko 50% and Malagouzia 50% ready wine down to a cool temperature and let it settle off of its primary lees. Next year we add fermented must of Xinomavro to this ready wine in the bottle provides the sparkle and leesy feel as it gets turned into alcohol and CO2. We do not disgorge, leaving the wine hazy, creating broader palate weight, pleasing textures, and balance throughout. This special bottling is done entirely by hand. After the bottling, we do remuage the bottles for 3 weeks. After we let the bottles stand for at least 3 months before to be ready for sales.

Dimitrios Kioutsoukis’s family hailed from East Romylia back to the early 1900’s. The family had always harbored a dream to make wine like their ancestors, but lacked the finances to start a winery. Dimitrios trained and worked as a chemical engineer originally, and worked for many years in the medical field, to save money to fulfill this winemaking dream. The region he lived in, Thessaloniki, in northern Greece, had been well known for the cultivation of vines, but since phylloxera cultivation had all but died out. He studied winemaking through the UC Davis extension program and decided in 2010 to plant 11 hectares of vines of Greek varieties including Assyrtiko, Malagousia, Roditis, Xinomavro, Limnio, Muscat, and Moschfilero.

From the very beginning the vineyards were worked only in accordance with long-standing traditions, like manual pruning, hoeing of weeds, and harvesting, and use of natural sprays made from plants like nettle and yarrow, and composting and fertilization with natural manure. They always sought to do as few treatments as possible, to maintain balance with the natural way of the vines and nature. Then in 2015, with his daughter Stavroula, an agronomist and oenologist, he took the giant step of converting all his production to natural methods. The wines are now all naturally fermented with indigenous yeasts, have no products added or subtracted, are not filtered, and have zero sulfur added at bottling.