Fokiano NSW Red

A much(!) more talented writer than us gave her impressions of this wine: “Afianes, Fokiano Extra Brut 2020 Greece Certified Ecocert organic. Sealed with a crown cap and wax. 100% Fokiano. Pet-nat /Ancestral. Spontaneous bottle fermentation, zero dosage, undisgorged. Unfiltered, unfined. ‘Produced and bottled by Kostas, Nikos, Maris and Eftychia, 262  bottles made.’ You could argue the toss for red or rosé. Dark, dark rosé… pale red. I’m including this in a winter rosé article because it just fits there. It’s the colour of my Victoria plums when I pick them off our old lichen-ribbed tree and leave them to slowly poach in a pot on the stove without so much as a teaspoon of sugar or water. It’s cloudy. It smells like raspberry vinegar. It tastes of pomegranates cracked open with hot rocks on a hot-stone wall on a hot day under a wide blue sky. It buzzes with tiny bubbles and feels like licking old, wet terracotta roof tiles and it tastes like bruised plum skins and rain-bruised bougainvillea flowers and rain on crumbling concrete roads. It has the salt and sweet and fermented tang of umeboshi plums, but there are also flecks of hibiscus petals, dried tarragon, dried lemon grass. It’s so dense with complexity and Plath-like power and restraint and poignancy and wit-bitter-bite that it’s hard to find words that even come close to making sense of a wine like this; a wine that is, surely, a fabric of soul, not chemistry. It’s a fistful of life, the bubbles embroidering tiny shimmering star-like stitches on the tongue. It’s utterly extraordinary. It took my breath away.”