CHÂTEAU VARTELY | Winemaker’s Selection | Malbec | 2012
malbec
WineStatistics will be evaluating wines in no particular order on no particular schedule. Just stay tuned and you will never miss one. If the wine is tasted more than once, the rating table will be updated so as to reflect all the new impressions and observations. The logic is simple – the more we taste, the more we learn.
We’ll stick with Wine of Moldova for the time being and we have chosen quite a different wine this time – Winemaker’s Selection Malbec 2012 from Château Vartely. It is a single-variety malbec wine and, in fact, only a few winemakers in Moldova do grow malbec grapes, mostly for blending with other noble varieties.
Let’s take a deeper look at the tasting notes and the wine’s review statistics:
Visual
The wine has a noble-clear garnet color, it is light and quite transparent, the rim-color is on the ruby side, which is quite unusual for a malbec wine.
Olfactory
The nose is clean and rich with no signs of wine faults. The first nose brings out notes of black fruits – sweet black cherry and sour cherry, then come the noble flavor of a medium roasted french barique – a very delicate, even fine flavor, but one that will keep haunting you over time, in a positive way.
Gustatory
The wine is bone-dry, just slightly higher on alcohol than expected, with medium acidity and almost perfect tannin. Speaking of tannin level, it makes the wine body taste bold and spicy with good balance overall. The barrel fermentation brings out a bit of bitterness and astringency to the long finish, but this only makes this wine a perfect match for evening meat-based meals.
Aftertaste
The wine has a long finish with a balanced, just a little on the astringent side, aftertaste, which fills your mouth and makes you think of that rosbif-meat you spotted on the menu. This is that kind of wine, when words like masculine and taught comes in mind.
This is definitely a fine Wine of Moldova and the overall rating says the same, with 88.8 points scored it is right there, among the best wines we’ve tasted so far. Please click on the chart icon on the left in order to get to the wine rating page, where you can find all the wines we’ve tasted to date.
Last but not least, this wine is fresh-released on the market, it replaces the Winemaker’s Selection Malbec 2011, and it may feel a little harsh and sharp at the beginning, but it just need a little time to settle down (it is a malbec after all, a grape variety that only France and Argentina could manage properly), and from what we’ve tasted so far, Moldova’s malbec has a bright future ahead.
WineStatistics tasting results:
CHÂTEAU VARTELY
Winemaker’s Selection | Malbec | 2012
grape: | malbec |
overall rating: | 88.8 |
conclusion: fine | highly recommended
____________________________________________________________________________
(c) The WineStatistics ratings are based solely on our own knowledge of the world of wine and on our personal wine tastes, which may, or may not, differ from yours – the reader. There are no absolutes of right and wrong in wine appreciation.
WineStatistics 