Two years later, in 1995, Yannis Kalaïtzidis joined the venture.
The result was Wine Art Estate and the first range of products, Techni Alipias, a red, a white and a rosé wine, were introduced and gained immediately their share of the quality wines market.
Wine Art aims to present how well certain Greek and cosmopolitan varieties are adapted to the microclimate of Drama. Towards this direction, a new wine, Chardonnay Idisma Drios was put to market in 1999. This was the first of a new range of products, Idisma Drios (“sweetly oaked”), to be followed by Assyrtiko, Merlot and Syrah. In great vintages, the Estate also vinifies a limited quantity of Nebbiolo.
The Winery
The elegant modern winery of Wine Art Estate is located on the outskirts of the village of Mikrochori.
The first section of the establishment was built in 1998 and in 2007 an adjacent building was built on the other side of the road.
The construction work was completed in 2008 and the winery is now housed in a complex of two beautiful buildings, while the two “towers” that mark the edge of both buildings prove architectural aesthetics and harmony.
The two sections of the winery are connected by an underground tunnel, which houses the cellars. With a covered area of 3000 m, both on the ground and underground, it has a production capacity of 300,000 bottles.
The functional, spacious production area was designed specifically for the new building. It houses the state-of-the-art equipment for the production of quality wines: heat exchangers to chill the destemmed grapes, pneumatic press, special vats for skin contact maceration of white and red grapes, stainless steel fermentation tanks with automated temperature control systems, cold room for white wine fermentation and ageing in oak barrels, oak fermentation vats for the vinification of certain red wines, and stabilisation tanks.
A computerised central control system constantly monitors the entire production process (fermentation and maturation temperatures, pumping, etc.), intervening automatically and generating a record of each fermentation tank.
All of the Estate’s red wines and some of the whites are then transferred to the underground cellars for the next stage of their development. Here, in stable temperature and humidity conditions, maintained by a climate control system, in hundreds of French oak barrels, the wines age before being bottled.
