Vassilis Topsis has been our partner since 2013. A year that was also marked as Vilana Pirovolikes’ first vintage launch. Vassilis is married to Anna and together they have 5 children. They are both farmers, holding a profound respect and love towards nature as it is their home, their profession but also the source for their family’s food. In 2016, Andrew Jefford visited Pirovolikes vineyard, tasted the wine right at the point of its birth and enjoyed Anna’s homemade goods. As he later wrote in an article, he was awed by them. “This was Vassilis and Anna Topsis’s Pirovolikes Vineyard, and there was a bottle of their 2014 Vilana, made by Lyrarakis, on the table, alongside Anna’s home-baked meat, vegetable and cheese pastries.  As we pitched up (literally: the track to the vineyard was steep and deeply rutted), she was gathering wild golden thistle (scolymus, in fact a member of the chicory family) to cook later.  We ate the pastries and drank the wine.  It was fresh and incisive, like the wind: a splash of lemon, shattered stones, bitter herbs. They were proud of the moment, and the wine; and I was, in a way, awed by them, for I could see that neither wine nor the moment was easily won from nature.  They keep goats, for milk, cheese and meat; they bake their own bread, in a wood-fired oven they light every two weeks.  They live from the vine and the olive” - Andrew Jefford, 2016, The call of Crete, Decanter.com