Jelasi

There are wine estates with long histories. And then there is Jelasi — a winery whose founding vine was planted in the sixth century before the Common Era by the first ancient Greek colonists to arrive at Zefirio Cape, today known as Capo Bruzzano on the Ionian coast of Calabria. This is not mythology: it is documented history, and the wine produced here today is its direct continuation.

The Greek colonists who settled this stretch of the Ionian coast found, in what is now the village of Bianco, a territory of geomorphological and climatic characteristics virtually identical to the areas of Greece where their native Greco vine had originally flourished — white chalky land, dense with clay and argyle elements, named Sperone, on a hill whose very name, Bianco, reflects the distinctive pale soil beneath it. The vine they planted thrived. It has been growing here, continuously, for two and a half millennia.

The estate's DOC certification was awarded in the 1980s by presidential decree — and with it, the extraordinary legal protection that this wine can only be produced within the territory of the village of Bianco, which bears worldwide patent and trademark. This is not simply a wine with a geographical indication: it is a wine whose territory is legally inalienable, protected by the Italian state as a unique cultural and agricultural patrimony.

The Jelasi Greek Wine presents with an amber-like yellow colour and golden reflections — a wine of warm taste, with the typical backtaste of citric fruits and sweet flowers, honey and almonds, bergamot and orange blossom. It is offered in two bottle types, each classically shaped and coloured differently, as befits a wine whose sense of occasion is as ancient as its origins.

A second expression, in the passito style, carries the aromatic warmth further: soft and enticing scents of orange blossom and almonds, flavours of varietal honeys and bergamot, a genuine fresh taste with the typical passito sweet backtaste that the catalogues of southern Italian sweet wines have rarely matched. It has been acknowledged as an oenological masterpiece, and the data supports the designation: passito wines globally registered an increase in sales of 11.9% in gross value and 8.5% in volumes in the first half of 2021 alone — a category whose moment has clearly arrived.

Jelasi is not a wine that requires fashionable framing. It requires only the understanding that some things in the wine world are irreplaceable — and that the Greco of Bianco, planted by Greek colonists on a Calabrian hillside twenty-five centuries ago, is among the most irreplaceable of all.

Available through UniqueWines in strictly limited quantities. This wine does not wait for the curious; it waits for the ready.