Ios Winery was conceived as an idea during November of 2013. After encountering and overcoming several obstacles, it was founded on April 2014, which was the year we did our sales debut. After getting positive reviews and encouraging sales results we decided to implement our initial plan which was “wine”, from tending the vineyards, to producing it and finally providing it to the market. Construction of the winery did not start until May 2015, and was completed by October 2016, however even with a half-built production area we produced our first vintage on Ios in 2015.

Our vineyards are not centralised in one part of the island, but instead are spread out in 4 areas each of which have slightly different conditions. One is next to the sea, another has high elevation and another has better orientation towards the sun. The soil in all of our vineyards is high in clay and is quite rocky which gives nice mineral flavours to our wines. Also, all of our wines are single variety  and originate from a single vineyard. This gives us the ability to make distinct wines from the same variety, making use of the differences in the microclimate of each vineyard.

Our viticulture practices are really close to bio or organic, however because we have a very limited production, about 600kgs of grapes per 1000m² of vineyard (6000 bottles in total) we cannot afford to lose part of our vineyards. In a normal year, we use copper-sulfur solution for preventive spraying typically after rainfall. In August/September all our grapes are hand-harvested and selected in the field. Any grapes that are not up to our quality standards are not harvested. Our harvests start at dawnbreak and last until 10:00-11:00 and each vineyard is harvested seperately than the rest.

We are focused in making quality wine rather than volumes of it, and to accomplice that we have set up two points of quality control, one during the harvest and one before processing. Production of wine is conducted in the most natural way possible, using a pneumatic press to extract the must from the grapes and pure gravitational flow to transfer the must to the tanks. The natural flow is accomplished by our unique machinery placement, as the design was focused around safeguarding the quality of our wine by limiting the use of mechanical intermediaries. In the final stages of wine making, we monitor the tanks continuously and adjust their conditions according to the results of our state-of-the-art laboratory.

The island of Ios does not have a very developed and sophisticated wine culture, which is something we hope to change by establishing our business here. However, the topography of the island provides a unique metallic character to the wine which sets it apart from the rest of the Aegean wines. While currently we are focusing on the local market, we soon plan to bring more people in contact with the wine of Ios.