Portfolio Mylonas Winery

Ancient Soul, Modern Precision

Southeast of Athens, on limestone slopes farmed by one family for over a century, ancient grape varieties grow in soil whose mineral wealth funded the civilizations of ancient Greece. They are tended using methods that predate words like organic and biodynamic by generations, if not millennia, and their fruit is turned into wine with a level of technical skill that rivals that of anywhere in Europe. Mylonas is the epitome of what Greece possesses more than any other country: an unbroken thread that runs back to antiquity, modernized without ever being severed. These hills sit close enough to ancient Athens to have likely supplied wine to the philosophers who invented Western thought, and the Mylonas family working this ground today is still the same one that worked it a century ago.

The Highest Ground in Mesogaia

The Mylonas vineyard sits in the hills above Keratea, the highest ground in Mesogaia - the ancient name for eastern Attica's central plain, and today the region's most important wine zone - at 200 to 350 meters. Here sea breezes off the coast temper the heat and slow ripening in a region that otherwise sits low and flat. The soil is a mixture of sandy clay over limestone, transitioning to shale near the coastal town of Lavrio, part of the Lavreotiki UNESCO Global Geopark, recognized for holding more than 700 distinct mineral species. Rare is to find vineyards on ground this geologically significant.

Three Generations, Founded on Savatiano

Stamatis Mylonas's grandfather founded the estate in 1917, aging wine in amphorae buried in the earth. His father modernized the operation in the 1970s. Stamatis and his brothers Antonis and Tasos took over in 2000, built a new winery, and doubled down on Savatiano, a grape most of the market had already dismissed as a bulk variety.

Few grapes can do what Savatiano does here: the same fruit becomes a bright varietal white wine, a skin-contact orange wine with real structure, a traditional pet-nat, and Retsina itself, without losing its identity in the process. It also ages far better than its old reputation as a simple, quaffing grape ever suggested. For the Mylonas family, it's as much personal as technical - a variety they grew up with, farmed on the ground where they grew up, and that has become inseparable from how they think of themselves as winemakers.

But the estate's range doesn't stop at Savatiano. The family farms real breadth across these limestone slopes: Assyrtiko, grown here rather than in its more famous home of Santorini, and Malagousia, planted on cooler, sea-facing plots for aromatic lift. Farming throughout is low-yield and hand-harvested, producing fruit that reflects a genuinely mineral-driven site rather than generic Mediterranean ripeness. Alongside stainless steel, the family still ferments some wine the way their grandfather did, in clay amphorae, a direct, physical link between the estate's founding and its wine today.