Diamantakis Winery – Petali White 2025

## Diamantakis Winery Petali white 2025 (91)

The Petali Assyrtiko is Diamantakis' single-varietal Assyrtiko, 100 percent, and sits in the estate's white range above the Prinos and the Vidiano, but below the Diamantopetra. The first vintage appeared in 2016, back then simply as Diamantakis Assyrtiko. Today's name alludes to craftsmanship. "Petali" is the name for the treadle of a loom. The back label tells how, in the Venetian era, the nuns of the Agios Antonios monastery wove so loudly that it could be heard all the way to Asites, where the Assyrtiko grows today. The wooden treadles are depicted on the label. That is how the estate tells it, there is no independent historical confirmation for it.

The grapes come from the Korfi and Kaminia sites near Kato Asites in the regional unit of Heraklion. The winery itself lies on a foothill of the Psiloritis. The sites sit at 430 to 550 meters, face northeast, catch the winds from the Aegean and stand on limestone-rich, clay-rich soils with limestone. For 2025 the estate reports that it applied zeolite in all vineyards against early water stress. Fermentation takes place in stainless steel at 14 to 18 degrees, after which the wine rests three months on the fine lees, seeing no wood at all. The person responsible is Zacharias Diamantakis, who studied oenology and beverage technology in Athens and founded the estate in 2007 with his brothers Michalis and Ioannis. Today the three farm 15 hectares across roughly 30 parcels. The wine is bottled as PGI Crete. White wine from Assyrtiko does not fall under the local PDO Dafnes, which is reserved for Liatiko. It carries 13.5 percent alcohol. The data sheet lists 6.2 grams of total acidity at pH 3.31, more than the 5.7 grams of the 2024.

Expectations from outside are solid. For the 2025 the winery reports Silver with 90 points at the Decanter World Wine Awards 2026, Silver at the Thessaloniki Wine Trophy 2026 and a "Highly Commended" at The Wine Merchant Top 100 2026. Simos Georgopoulos gave the 2024 8 out of 10 in the FNL Guide and singled out pronounced citrus notes and lively acidity. Greg Sherwood MW described the 2023 in Wine Safari as showing bright fruit, citrus, a juicy texture and a salty-spicy finish. In the same vertical, published in September 2024, he rated the 2016, still under the old name, at 92+, the 2018 at 91 and the 2023 at 91+. According to Sherwood, the older bottles showed preserved freshness and additional maturity complexity.

I tasted it in October 2026 as a sample in a joint white-wine tasting. It ran from Vidiano to Assyrtiko, pitted Crete against northern Greece and revolved above all around acidity. It began with the Vidianos, among them the Passas Bidiano 2024, the Manolesakis EXIS Vidiano 2025 and Diamantakis' own Vidiano 2025. Then came the estate's barrel-aged Diamantopetra White 2025. The Petali arrived as the sixth wine, and at the end the two Assyrtikos from Kir-Yianni in the north, The North 2025 and Single Block Tarsanas 2023. This was not the first time we had the three Diamantakis whites side by side in the glass. In 2023 the Diamantopetra White 2021 with 93 points, the Petali 2021 with 90 and the Vidiano 2021 with 87 were already lined up together on the table, and the Diamantopetra astonished us back then with its acidity impression. The Petali 2021, around two years old at the tasting, we found quite good. At the time I noted it as a very good alternative to Santorini, for anyone seeking more island flair in a Cretan Assyrtiko, with elegance, refreshing salinity and a long finish. Blind, I wrote, anyone would think of the volcanic island, and for around 10 euros you would never get that on Santorini.

The 2025 is indeed a wine that is a lot of fun today, but in a different way. It is soft, has plenty of banana on the nose and plenty of honey on the palate. It feels to have distinctly less acidity than the house Vidiano with its rock-hard acidity and also less than the Diamantopetra, though that one is barrel-aged, which of course distorts a great deal. Analytically, the "distinctly" is of course not quite accurate. It is absurd, but in this combination with the other wines the Petali wins precisely through its softness, and one can hardly stress this enough. It is almost cuddly and the most drinkable wine of the whole tasting. The Diamantopetra White was for me an intermediate piece between the tame Assyrtiko and the wild house Vidiano, and the Vidiano itself was too angular for my taste.

From the Santorini alternative I saw in the 2021, this vintage has thus moved away a little. Instead of salinity and elegance, banana, honey and softness come to the fore. Closer to Santorini on the nose in this round was The North from the north, even though there too I encountered a touch too much banana. Anyone seeking, among the wines of this tasting, simply a refreshing wine for a hot summer afternoon must quite clearly reach for the Petali. Anyone seeking competition for the great wines of Santorini should look elsewhere. More on this in the report on the entire tasting.

The wine costs around 10 euros in Greece, as much as the 2021 already did. For me that is 91 points.