On the eastern slopes of Mount Vermio, wine country since antiquity: this corner of Macedonia has carried vines for as long as records exist, and under the Ottomans the town of Naoussa prospered on wine and textiles. The house of Boutari, founded there in 1879, carried the name abroad while most of Greek wine stayed anonymous.
In 1971 Naoussa became Greece's first appellation for dry red wine, built entirely on a single grape — Xinomavro, the "acid-black", pale in colour, fierce in tannin and acidity, unfolding over decades into tomato, olive and dried flowers. The comparison that follows it everywhere — the "Barolo of Greece" — says less about imitation than about kinship: a stubborn native grape, one mountain town, wines that demand patience.