Moschofilero

We're off to Greece today, but not the part that you think about every day. After our flight to Athens, we drove about an hour, mostly west across the Isthmus of Corinth, and finally southwest for another 45 minutes or so to the small town of Mantineia on the Pelopponesian peninsula. As you may recall from your grade school or high school ancient history classes, much happened here as the city-states of Greece battled, but today we're here to drink white wine.

It's a pretty good grape growing climate here in a region perhaps better known for Kalamata olives. But, if we think of some of our other travels, we might say the same about our trips to Italy although many would say it is better known for its wine with olives being the ugly stepchild there.

We drink the wine today from a largely local grape, Moschofilero. While more pinkish in color than anything else, Moschofilero produces a highly aromatic white wine with lots of spice, much in the style of one of the Traminers. It has good acidity, ripens late, harvests late, and tends to have survival problems in extremely hot weather. While summers in the Peloppenese are extremely warm with daytime highs average about 31-32C/88-90F, temperatures rarely make it to 38C/100F thus allowing Moschofilero to flourish.

It's a flexible grape; it is used to make dry, off-dry, and sweet dessert wines. Probably most popular are the off-dry versions and that's where we will focus today.

It's fairly light-bodies and tends to be low in alcohol content, perhaps 12% ABV, by today's standards. On the nose, we get a rose garden integrated with spicy potpourri. The palate is a bit curious with flavors of juicy pink grapefruit, lemon, honeydew melon, dried capers, and almonds as well as hints of white pepper and middle eastern spice.

Today, we're having our Moschofilero with a midday brunch in order to pair it well, We're serving it with the traditional dish of lox, cream cheese, capers, and some red onion with slices of honeydew and cantaloupe to garnish.

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