Compline Wine Club - Monthly Pickup

Our May selections bring back two enduring memories of travel for me. I’m not sure if what follows constitutes a sales pitch, but I love these wines.

Santorini – Assyrtiko, Hatzidakis “Familia” 2022

I visited Haridimos Hatzidakis for the second time back in 2014. He was like a wild man of Santorini—I think of buttoned-up Sancerre folks, surely raising eyebrows at the unkempt upstart Didier Dagueneau—but his wines gave gravitational pull to the Aegean island and helped cement its image as a world-class winemaking destination. He chain-smoked and improvised a tour through an unfinished cave full of salty air and chalk-marked barrels. He looked solemn, and more than a little distracted, on that day.

After Haridimos committed suicide in 2017, he left his wife and three children behind. Winemaking friends pitched in to help. When I returned for a third visit in 2022, I wasn’t sure what toll grief may have taken. What I found was a new warmth and a new cast of characters, intent on maintaining the legacy of Haridimos Hatzidakis. Spiros Papandreou makes the wines, Haridimos’ youngest child has started enology school, and his eldest is an opera singer.

Hatzidakis Assyrtiko is everything I love about Santorini: fierce, stark beauty buoyed by a reminder that unexpected tragedy is always underfoot, so please enjoy yourself while you can. 

Carignan, Longaví “Soberano” 2021

I’ve only felt like I was in the beginning of a horror film once or twice in my life. One year after I last saw Haridimos, in an antipodal February summer, a driver I couldn’t communicate with dropped me off somewhere four hours south of Santiago and maybe 30 minutes in from the coast. I was in the Maule Valley, amidst the pine forests and low mountains that span the coast of Chile. I was at a winery, called J. Bouchon, which was founded in the 19th century, and there wasn’t a soul around. Anywhere. I took one look at a bleached bull’s skull adorning the winery wall, stared deep into a couple of soil pits, and the panicked anxiety of watching too much Children of the Corn at a young age set in quick.

Kidding. Mostly. After an hour or so Julio Bouchon himself drove up. (Whew.) We walked out among Cabernet, Carmenère, and told salvaje País vines. We had an amazing dinner and a lengthy conversation. The next morning somebody else picked me up and we drove headlong into a coastal forest fire to marvel at some young vines and eat urchins, but that's a different story. The point is: Julio Bouchon is one of Chile’s most important winemakers, and the work he is doing with Longaví is pretty spectacular. (Frankly, we’ve got over a pallet of his Chilean wine in our back hallway right now, and I can’t say that’s… ever been the case before.) This “Soberano” bottling is dry-farmed Carignan, from a parcel planted in 1960, and it shows the world what’s possible in Chile when transparency and terroir are the focus