Lafazanis Winery — Geometria Agiorgitiko 2024

Geometria is Lafazanis's fresh, oak-free interpretation of Agiorgitiko from ancient Kleones at the gateway to the Nemea zone, labelled once again in 2024 as PGI Peloponnese, because part of the grapes come from the hill country of Korinthia. The style is unchanged, with 24 hours of cold maceration, six days of skin contact, cool fermentation at 18 °C and no barrel whatsoever. At around €10 it remains a wine meant to live off fruit, line and drinkability, not off wood.

In this series I have so far had two vintages in the glass myself. The 2020, which I valued at 89 points for precisely this unwooded, easy-drinking style, and the 2023, which showed the idea but stayed too flat and too short on the palate, so that I ended up at 88 points. The outside scores trace a similar up and down. The 2021 was the darling of 50 Great Greek Wines, the 2023 managed only Bronze at Decanter with 88 points, and the 2024 has now taken Gold there with 95 points, the highest accolade this line has received to date.

The 2024 vintage in Nemea was hot, dry, very early and low in volume, unlike the wet, fungus-plagued 2023, which seriously disrupted ripening. The dryness kept disease pressure low, so that the little fruit harvested often turned out healthy and concentrated. This is exactly what the Decanter note reflects, which for the 2024 cites not only red fruit and blossom but a chalky-mineral core, elegant structure, cocoa-like tannin and pomegranate acidity, in other words those structural terms that the 2023 precisely lacked. Simos Georgopoulos of the FNL Guide remained more restrained at the Peloponnese Wine Festival 2026, awarding 7.5 out of 10 and calling it rather dark and not very intense, though he too highlighted the persistent finish.

In the glass the pomegranate Decanter mentions is confirmed on the nose already. On the palate the wine is markedly denser than the 2020 and the 2023, with a rather coarse, crumbly tannin that makes itself felt. This is a far more classic Agiorgitiko, one that could just as well come from Nemea itself. It just lacks, right now, the coolness, that flintiness which made the earlier vintages attractive to me.

It corrects some of the weaknesses of the 2023, the finish, for instance, is now somewhat longer. Still, it doesn't reach any higher for me, because the coarse, crumbly tannin and above all the missing coolness hold it back. Thus the difficult 2023 and the celebrated 2024 end up on a par for me, only for opposite reasons, the one lacks palate, the other coolness. The seven-point gap that Decanter draws between the two is, in my view, not justifiable. For me these are 88 points.