iris literary agency

Tzitzi Maria

Tzitzi Maria

Maria Tzitzi is an enologist living in Athens and working for Greek and French wine companies. This is her second novel. It was awarded as the second best in the world crime book on wine at the Gourmand Wine books awards 2011.

All wines have the potential of one day becoming exceptional. When circumstances coincide conveniently, the course of history can change, and an anonymous wine may suddenly and unexpectedly be found in the front line of branded advertising. It can even result in becoming an example worth emulating, thus creating from the beginning a different story.

The peculiar wines of the world are those that were created randomly, unexpectedly, because nature surpassing her boundaries drifted and deviated from the rules. This exception has a unique quality and peculiarity which can sometimes even be magical.

Coming from a well-respected family from the Rhone wine making region in France, Marie-Agnes has learnt from childhood to love the land and cultivate vines. Her father is the governor of Chile where she grows up.

While still very young she falls in love with Juan, but he was thought to be her mother’s lover and her father kills him. Her father is ousted and disgraced before being put to death. Marie-Agnes and her mother try to escape overseas to Europe, but her mother’s violent death forces Marie-Agnes to return to Chile, where, disguised as a boy, she works in her family’s land. There she meets Juan, who has escaped death. But after a brief intense love affair Juan perishes in an accident.

A large, well known wine company, located in Sancerre in the Loire River valley, with subsidiary companies among others in Greece, is responsible for the illegal trafficking of rough diamonds.

The head of the police investigation, a man of unconventional methods, Jean Michel, is very close to solving the case when Christina Deli, a Greek enologist working for the company and who collaborating with him, has an accident while traveling to Santorini and remains in coma.