Winemaking and tsipouro production have been among the activities of the estate since the first generation of its owners.
The brick-built hamokela at the beginning and later, when it became the home of the “sembros” who cultivated the estate, the “large” warehouse with cement block walls, became the place for the fermentation and maturation of the wines.
This “winery” in the same location was expanded, equipped, licensed and, in the last five years, modernized with a small, continuous upgrade of facilities and equipment with its own funds, without bank loans or European subsidies.
This gradual evolution has preserved both the building style of the winery and its traditional form, so that it can potentially be categorized as a boutique winery that aims to produce traditional, sophisticated, complex wines based on the coexistence of different indigenous varieties that have even genetically matched each other.
From 1980 to the present day, for approximately 40 years, the Drouvas winery has been making wine mainly from the estate’s grapes and its “life” is divided into three seasons.
Recreating mustification in the 1980s
The first machines in the winemaking process
From the 80s to around 2000, a wine was made with the recipe of Mr. Sakis: for seven baskets of white grapes, one basket of black grapes. They are pressed in the press over linen, left for 24 hours and then flow into a small cistern. From there, with a deneke, into the barrel, where the tsipouritis of the marc goes directly. We weigh the resin with a balance (we steal it at the most for safety’s sake), we pour it in and when it is washed out, … we cork the barrel. Each barrel is available for consumption (giomatari-kamousi) and then we go to the next one and so on.
The only change in the process over these 40 years was the purchase of a pump that still exists and operates in the winery today.
From 2000 to 2017, when the first three labels were released on the market (¨Fonikas¨ white – rosé – red), Spyros, who had succeeded Sakis at the helm of the estate, began the gradual institutional-building and mechanical modernization that, since 2008, when his daughter studied oenology abroad in Athens, aims to create a small individual wine production business.
From 2017 to 2021, the activities are gradually transferred to Ioulia. The winery proceeds with the acquisition of infrastructure to join the wine tourism networks and collaborates with Nikos Lambropoulos to produce sparkling wines at its facilities, which will be released on the market in the summer of 2021.
In the 2020s, the goals are set to establish a boutique winery, on the outskirts of Pyrgos, open to experiential wine tourism, with modern and complex wines from the region’s indigenous varieties.
The great change from linen to the printing press
Photos from the Winery
The winemakers
Barrel maturation
Maturation in tanks
The bottles are lulled to sleep