Meet Our Producers #12 – Ousyra

Ousyra Winery – Syros

The story of Ousyra Winery is a story of love, where a Scottish sommelier, basically a wine lover, proceeded to turn this love into action and become a winemaker. As he says, in these 5 years of running the winery, it feels as if he has been doing an intensive PhD in winemaking, but the love for it has never faded away despite the hardships.

Maybe that is the secret why Ousyra comes back each year with wines that keep getting better and better.Syros, the island where the winery is located, holds a very special place in Mr Matland-Magill-Crichton’s heart, as he spent his summers there as a young boy with his family, that owned a house on the island. The island also was pivotal for creating his family, as he met his wife in the island, who was his neighbour in Syros.
Syros has always been and still is a source of happiness for the people behind Ousyra, a word which actually means happy in Phoenician and is supposed to have given Syros its name.

This “happy” organic winery produces its wine from the rare Cycladic varieties of Serifiotiko and Fokiano. The vineyards are ungrafted, something which certainly elevates the quality of the wines and is really rare to see especially for Serifiotiko and Fokiano varieties. The aim is to bottle the islands’ terroir through the wine and certainly Ousyra’s wines succeed in doing so, as the trees and fruits that surround the winery find their way into the bottles in the form of aromas and taste. There is also an underline salinity in the wines, due to the proximity to the sea, which makes the wine pair exceptionally well with food.

The people behind Ousyra winery want you to know that if you stood in the vineyard with a glass of their wine you would actually see what you taste; an island in a bottle.

We are so happy to have this inspiring winery in our network of producers and to be able to call Ousyra and its people our friends!