Estate Argyros was founded in 1903 in Episkopi Gonia, on the southeastern slope of Santorini, though the family had been growing vines and selling wine on the island for generations before that. Each generation added land: Matthew Argyros tripled the vineyard after 1950, and his son Yiannis, who took over in 1974, expanded it again while proving that dry assyrtiko could age and that Vinsanto belonged among the great sweet wines of the world. Today Yiannis's son Matthew, the fourth generation, runs the estate from a gravity-fed winery completed in 2015 and farms more than 120 hectares, the largest private vineyard holding on the island. The vines are ungrafted, since phylloxera has never survived in Santorini's clay-free volcanic ash, and they are trained low in the traditional kouloura basket that shields the fruit from the Aegean wind. Average vine age exceeds 70 years, and the oldest parcels pass 200.
The Heritage Vinsanto release brings three vintages out of the family's hillside canava for the first time, and the 1947 is the oldest. It was made the way the estate still makes Vinsanto: assyrtiko with a tenth each of athiri and aidani, sun-dried for two weeks after harvest, then fermented slowly and spontaneously in cement. From there it went into small, thoroughly used Russian, French, and Austrian oak barrels, between 300 and 1,350 liters, and stayed there for nearly eight decades. No new wood ever touched it. The yields were tiny at harvest and shrank at every stage after, through drying, evaporation, and concentration. From these oldest lots, a hectare gives around 400 half-liter bottles. It is bottled in 500ml.
The nose carries hibiscus and rose-hip tea, then dried fig, dried cherry, candied orange peel, baklava, and halva. The sweetness is enormous and the acidity cuts straight through it, so the finish reads as salt and smoke rather than sugar. The Wine Advocate awarded the 1947 a perfect 100 points, the first such score for a Greek wine. It is at peak now and will hold for decades in a cool cellar.
