Grapes: Koumariano and Mavro Potamisi

Open to the elements, Tinos is perhaps the most wild and windswept island of the Cyclades, and it was the island’s rugged beauty that led Jérôme Binda to move from France with his young family over a decade ago.The Bindas’ vineyards can be found crawling amidst a remote, otherworldly landscape strewn with giant boulders, some three hundred to four hundred metres above the Aegean in the island’s east. The old bush vines of indigenous varieties are up to two hundred years of age and grow on their original roots over weathered, sandy granite soils, which lend the wines a nourishing, mineral quality.

A blend of roughly equal parts of old vines Koumariano and Mavro Potamisi, which ferment separately as a mix of whole bunches and destemmed grapes for three weeks, before being foot-trodden and pressed to vats for a year of ageing. A brilliant shade of ruby, the flavours here feel resolutely Mediterranean, with notes of black fig, stones and herbs. A wine that makes so much sense alongside the wonderful roasts of lamb or goat you find in the tavernas of Tinos’s interior.