Gaia Wines 4-6H Agiorgitiko Rosé 2025
£13.45
The wine
The name is the method: the Agiorgitiko spends four to six hours on its skins, and no longer. That short window gives the pale colour and the delicate red-berry character without any of the weight, and the wine is bottled early to keep it crisp and immediate.
The name is the method: the Agiorgitiko spends four to six hours on its skins and no longer. That short window gives the pale colour and delicate red-berry character without any of the weight, and the wine is bottled early to keep it crisp and immediate. Agiorgitiko means Saint George's grape.
The producer
Gaia Wines
View all Gaia Wines winesGaia was founded in 1994 by Leon Karatsalos and Yiannis Paraskevopoulos, and stands among the handful of estates that dragged Greek wine into the modern era. Paraskevopoulos holds a doctorate in oenology from Bordeaux, and the technical rigour shows throughout the range.
They work from two wineries in the two places that matter most for what they are trying to do: Nemea in the Peloponnese for Agiorgitiko, and Santorini for Assyrtiko. The Santorini vineyards are extraordinary in their own right, ungrafted and pre-phylloxera because the volcanic ash cannot host the louse, and trained into low basket shapes called kouloura that shelter the fruit from the Aegean wind.
The stated aim from the start was to explore the boundaries of the indigenous Greek varieties rather than plant international ones, and the range shows how far that can be pushed: a Retsina made seriously rather than as a joke, Assyrtiko fermented in acacia, in amphora and in stainless steel, and an eight-year-old Vinsanto from sun-dried grapes.
