Diamantakis Winery – Diamantopetra Rosé 2025

The Diamantopetra range is the more ambitious of Diamantakis's offerings, and Konstantinos Lazarakis MW calls it "the most prestigious line" of the house in The Wines of Greece (p. 370). The rosé within it is a young wine. The first vintage was 2022, so the 2025 is only the fourth. In the glass sits single-varietal Liatiko, Greece's earliest-ripening red variety and at the same time the flagship grape of the PDO Dafnes. Even so, the label reads only PGI Crete, and that is no downgrade, because a PDO was simply not available for this wine. The Dafnes specification recognises only dry and sweet red wines, and there is no room there for a rosé. The grapes grow near Kato Asites in the regional unit of Heraklion, on the eastern foothills of Psiloritis, between 350 and 550 metres on calcareous clay and limestone, with a northeastern exposure and sea winds off the Aegean, at a yield of 8 tonnes per hectare. The cellar work is kept lean, with two to three hours of skin contact before fermentation, which takes place in stainless steel. The man responsible is Zacharias Diamantakis, one of the three brothers who founded the family estate in 2007 and are third-generation grape growers. He studied oenology in Athens. The wine has 12.5 percent alcohol, and the estate gives a figure of around 10,000 bottles.

On Crete the 2025 vintage provisionally stands at 7.5 out of 10, putting it above the Cretan median of 6.5. According to the association's harvest report it was another year of drought following a three-year rainfall deficit, with yield losses of up to 50 percent, though the bulletin rates the grape quality as good to very good and above the level of an average year. The estate itself began the harvest on 4 August with the early-ripening Liatiko.

The nose is pleasant and cherry-scented. On the palate the wine has decent structure and plenty of tannin. The finish is decent too.

From the same house and vintage I tasted the Prinos Rosé in July, the entry-level rosé, at 86 points. That wine was a little short of acidity for me and struck me as somewhat too round, with slightly oxidative notes and plenty of caramel. The Diamantopetra, by contrast, has structure and plenty of tannin. Greg Sherwood MW rated the Diamantopetra Rosé 2023 at 90 points.

In Greece the wine costs around 13 euros. For me this is 89 points.