CARLEVANA | Raritet | Malbec | 2011
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 will taste one more Wine of Moldova tonight and we wanted to try something rare, something less popular, and we’ve decided that the best fit would be a malbec wine, and because there are only a few winemakers in Moldova who grow malbec grapes, the choice was rather obvious – Raritet Malbec 2011 from Carlevana. This wine is part of the Raritet series – the winemaker’s flagship wines, limited edition, made from it’s best grapes at it’s peak.
Let’s take a deeper look at the tasting notes and the wine’s review statistics:
Visual
The wine has a clear garnet-purple color, it is semi-transparent, with the rim-color of a clear garnet shade, 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 strong notes of sour and blue fruits: sour cherry, blue plum, blueberry, candied sour cherry, red plum and mirabelle prune. The second nose tends towards the earthy side, with soft notes of oak, red pepper, wormwood and limestone.
Gustatory
The wine is medium-dry, a little higher on alcohol than expected, with moderate acidity and medium tannin, which makes the wine taste green but mellow, herbaceous but still a bit too opulent. The overall balance is fair, with a little less character than expected from a limited edition, top quality wine – it is lacking individuality, but that makes it a very friendly, easy to drink wine overall.
Aftertaste
The wine has a medium finish with a balanced, just a little astringent aftertaste, which may be a perfect pair with a young soft cheese like brie or camembert.
This is definitely a fine Wine of Moldova and the overall rating says the same, with 85.8 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, one can encounter not so many malbec wines these days here in Moldova, that’s why it is very hard to rate them, when being limited in direct comparisons on level terms. It is also true that France and Argentina are in a league of their own when talking about malbec, but, here we stand, Moldova and it’s malbec wines, at the very beginning of the journey. It is also true that there are quite a lot to be learnt, mistakes to be made and rewards to be collected, but as the saying goes – even the longest journey of a thousand miles begins with that first step.
WineStatistics tasting results:
CARLEVANA
Raritet | Malbec | 2011
grape: | malbec |
overall rating: | 85.8 |
conclusion: fine | highly recommended
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(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.
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