Retsina Reimagined: The Science Behind 1979 Wines

Why one Greek oenologist decided to treat the pine forest like a vineyard and what happened when she did

There’s a moment in almost every wine person’s life when Retsina leaves a mark. Not the good kind. A sharp, resinous assault from a beach bar on Kos, or a cheap bottle at a taverna that tasted more of turpentine than anything you’d willingly put in a glass twice. For most of us, that moment becomes a verdict: Retsina, no thanks.

I held that verdict for years. Then Eleni Kechri sent me three bottles.

Eleni is the founder of 1979 Wines, a Retsina project based in northern Greece that has quietly been earning some of the highest scores this ancient wine style has ever received including an 18/20 from Jancis Robinson’s Wine Journal. She is a chemical engineer by training, an oenologist by vocation (she studied in both Thessaloniki and Bordeaux), and one of the most rigorous thinkers I’ve come across in over a decade of tasting and writing about wine. I had the chance to sit down with her on Sparks by VinoVonk, taste all three wines together, and understand what she’s actually doing.

What she’s doing, it turns out, is treating the pine forest like a vineyard.

A Wine Style 7,000 Years in the Making

Retsina is not a modern invention and not a shortcut. It is, arguably, one of the oldest continuous wine styles on earth. The Ancient Greeks didn’t add resin to their wine for flavour they used it because they had no alternative. Pine resin was the sealant of choice for amphorae, the clay vessels used both to ferment and store wine. Applied to the inner walls of the vessel and used to seal the cap, the resin protected the wine from oxidation at a time when silicone, stainless steel, and inert gas didn’t exist.

What happened over thousands of years is what often happens when a constraint becomes a tradition: people grew accustomed to it, then came to love it. The vine and the Pinus halepensis the Aleppo pine, native across the Mediterranean coexisted in the same landscapes, the same growing seasons, the same Greek summers. Their fates became intertwined.

By 1979, Retsina had received official recognition in Greece as a traditional appellation, which was one of the reasons she named her company after it.

The Problem with Modern Retsina

Ask Eleni why Retsina developed such a poor reputation, and she doesn’t hesitate. It wasn’t the wine style. It was the shortcuts.

For decades, the industry treated the resin as a commodity. Collectors used sulphuric acid paste on pine bark to stimulate greater resin flow from the trees, prioritising volume over quality. The resin was often sourced indiscriminately, with no attention paid to the forest it came from, the age of the tree, or how extraction affected the tree’s own chemistry. Nobody was asking what the resin actually tasted like or whether the compounds it introduced to the wine were desirable ones.

Eleni started asking those questions systematically from 2018 onwards. Her background in chemical engineering enabled her to conduct proper research: gas chromatography analysis of resin compounds, controlled trials with resin from different forests, and comparisons of sustainable harvesting methods versus acid-stimulated collection. What she found was decisive.

Resin harvested sustainably without sulphuric acid, allowing the tree to weep freely at its own pace contains dramatically lower concentrations of heavy aldehydes responsible for the harsh, solvent-like notes that give cheap Retsina its reputation. Instead, the more delicate terpene compounds come through, including terpinen-4-ol and other aromatics that are fresh, herbal, and genuinely pleasant. The tree, given the freedom to express itself, produces something worth listening to.

Forest Terroir: A New Concept with Ancient Roots

The breakthrough insight of Eleni’s work is something she calls forest terroir the idea that the provenance of the pine resin shapes the character of the wine just as fundamentally as the vineyard, the vintage, or the winemaking approach.

To demonstrate this, she created what amounts to a controlled experiment. All three wines I tasted were made from Assyrtiko grapes grown in her own vineyard in Gerakona, in the Emathia region of northern Greece, at an altitude of 350 metres in the foothills near Kilkis. Same variety, same terroir, same harvest, same winemaker. The only variable? The forest.

Thalassino uses resin collected from Pinus halepensis growing along the coastline of Halkidiki, trees whose roots reach into sandy soil metres from the Aegean. Stergianos uses resin from the Megara plateau in Attica, an inland forest at a higher elevation. The 2020 Kalos is an assemblage of three resin sources Halkidiki, Megara, and a third from Corinthia in the Peloponnese representing the way Retsina was typically made before Eleni began separating them.

The difference between Thalassino and Stergianos is not subtle. It’s not a matter of nuance; you need a trained palate to detect. They taste genuinely, obviously different in a way that immediately reframes everything you thought you knew about this wine style.

The Wines

1979 Kalos Thalassino 2022 arrives with a rush of coastal air. The Assyrtiko’s natural citrus precision, lemon zest, and grapefruit pith are present and vibrant, but behind it comes something you’d more typically associate with standing at the edge of the sea: iodine, salt spray, a shell-like mineral quality that Eleni describes as “ostracos,” the scent of oyster shells. The pine note is genuinely there, but it’s lifted and lemon-tinted rather than heavy. The finish is long, bright, and saline. Pair it with anything from the water: shellfish, sea bass with olive oil, grilled octopus.

1979 Kalos Stergianos 2022 comes from further inland, and it shows. The acidity is marginally lower, though the base wine is identical, and the aromatic profile is more herbal: rosemary, white pepper, a drier, earthier quality that speaks of Mediterranean scrubland rather than coastline. It’s rounder and more contemplative than the Thalassino, with more textural weight on the mid-palate. I found myself reaching for it again. Eleni pairs it with white meat and butter-based sauces; I’d add a young Comté or a soft, herb-rubbed sheep’s cheese without hesitation.

1979 Kalos 2020 is the oldest of the three and shows it beautifully. The Assyrtiko is already developing its secondary characters: citrus marmalade, with the 2022s having fresh lemon; hazelnuts, with the 2022s having white flowers; and the faintest trace of petrol, which tells you this grape has serious ageing capacity. The resin here reads as integrated and complex rather than defined by a single forest character; the blend adds dimensionality. It’s the most food-versatile of the three: Eleni suggests yellow cheese with marmalade, a ripe Camembert, even a dark-rinded Alpine cheese. She’s right.

Retsina as Culture

One of the things Eleni says that stays with me is this: “Retsina is not only a wine. It is a culture.” She means it literally. The pine forests of Greece are protected by law; you cannot cut a Pinus halepensis, even if it grows in your own garden. The right to collect resin from state forests is allocated through a social welfare system to collectors who meet specific criteria, providing livelihoods in rural communities. Eleni works with collectors who have agreed to harvest without sulphuric acid, which is not easy to find, because the chemical-free method is slower and yields less.

The wine in your glass, if it’s made the way 1979 Wines makes it, represents an entire ecosystem: the forest, the collector, the tree’s own biology, the winemaker’s research. That’s before you’ve even opened the bottle.

What This Means for Your Wine List

1979 Wines is currently distributed in Germany, Belgium, the UK, and Canada. Netherlands distribution is reportedly on track, and given that Greece is one of the most popular holiday destinations for Dutch wine drinkers, the timing feels right. Prices in Greece run to approximately €16 for the 2022 single-forest wines and €25 for the 2020 assemblage; expect European retail prices to be somewhat higher.

But here’s the honest case for why you should be paying attention to this regardless of where you live: Retsina is almost certainly the most underrated wine style in the world right now. The combination of Assyrtiko’s ageing potential, the aromatic complexity of sustainable resin, and the sheer novelty of the forest terroir concept means this is a category worth tracking. Eleni Kechri is at the front of it.

She’s also, as she mentioned at the end of our conversation, still researching. Rosé Retsina, claret-style expressions, experiments with Assyrtiko vinified without oak alongside different resin sources. The project is only a few years old and is already producing wines in the category. I’m curious where it goes.

Yamas.