Not a family affair, Iliana Malihin started the company in 2019. After having worked in wineries in Greece (Crete, Santorini), in Italy (Arianna Ochippinti) and France (Sylvain Pataille) she made her first wine in 2018 called Rizes2 (two roots) as it was a blend of prephylloxera vineyards of Crete and Santorini! After that, while she was searching for old vineyards she found the village Melampes in Rethymno and she decided to start up a winery there. Finally the aim of the winery becomes to search, find and rebirth old prephylloxera vineyards. Iliana made a kind of Bourgogne philosophy winery, as she makes 5 labels, each one is for a different village. She focuses only in Rethymno region as she believes it has something extraordinary in terms of terroir like vineyards in high elevation, slopes, terraces, old vines, schist, sand, clay or sometimes quartz with clay. Apart from the vineyards that she owns, she rent some other and she bought land that planted vines, the highest production comes from the local producers. She creates team of producers in each village, they make contracts, they have to cultivate organic and to be supervised all over the year by her, and she commits to buy the grapes in a high price for the standards of Greece. The cultivation is made with respect to the land. They don’t till the soil, they use only compost of earthworms as fertilizer and they spray with sulfur for Oidium and spray with seaweeds. In her private vineyards she applies also biodynamic preparations. In the winery the low intervention philosophy continues. She preserve high acidities with blending plots of different exposition (south&west&north) so she doesn’t have to change anything. The fermentation is spontaneous, the wines are maturing with the sounds of traditional Cretan music, she adds sulfites before bottling and she doesn’t filter.