Anna was raised in Australia with her parents who had emigrated, before returning to Greece to start her family in Nemea, the largest red wine appellation in Greece.
Her small winery and vineyards lay surrounded by the mythical mountains, which hosted battles between gods and rivers of wine – the blood of Hercules – going back to the time before antiquity.
From the very beginning, the winery has employed an organic philosophy and natural wine production in their cellars. All wines from Halkia Wines are certified organic and are produced exclusively from grapes harvested from their own 3.7 hectares of land. The grapes are all hand-harvested and gently pressed using a pneumatic press, before being subjected to wild fermentation in the winery’s small steel tanks. The wines are stabilised in the tanks, before being bottled – manually, three bottles at a time. Corking and labelling is also done by hand.
Anna is not well known throughout Greece, yet… but she and her wines have become popular on the New York natural wine scene, celebrated for her honest wine made from the large blue local grape varietal; Agiorgitiko.
We first visited Anna in September of 2019, just when the harvest was beginning.