EQUINOX | Shiraz | Rezerva Vinificatorului | 2011
syrah | merlot

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 continue to review Wine of Moldova, and we are back to the wine blend theme for a reason. The wine that we’ve chosen to review tonight is legendary – it is produced in a very limited edition and it is made of mostly syrah variety, with just a bit of merlot blended for complexity. This wine is regarded as one of the best wines of Moldova and an almost classic syrah wine – Shiraz Rezerva Vinificatorului 2011 from Equinox.

Let’s take a deeper look at the tasting notes and the wine’s review statistics:

Visual
The wine has a clear, ripe garnet color, with the rim-color of a pale ruby shade.

Olfactory
The nose is rich and pure, with no signs of wine faults. The first nose reveals very strong and delightful notes of ripe red and black fruits: ripe sour cherry, overripe sweet cherry, red grapefruit, blackberry, black plum and blackcurrant. The secondary nose is no less appetizing: black cherry, ripe pomegranate, dried cherry, dried apple and dried plum. Then, as an epilogue, come the mesmerizing notes of a medium roasted wood, red pepper and some noble notes of black tea.

Gustatory
The wine is dry, with no residual sugar, but maybe just hint of. It has moderate, well integrated alcohol level, high acidity and dry tannin. This is a delicious and quite complex wine, with a bittercrisp, seedy accent, elegant, quite complex and harmonious. The wine has a good overall balance – this is a firm and bold wine, with a nuanced, fruit-forward profile.

Aftertaste
The wine has a quite long finish, long enough to make you fall in love with it’s velvety, bitter-seedy aftertaste. This is a wine to be remembered – bold and spicy, with nuanced oak notes – a real syrah/shiraz.

This is definitely a great Wine of Moldova and the overall rating says the same, with 90.5 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, how can we not mention that simple fact, that this wine was very hard to find – it was produced in just 1038 bottles, which is why this wine was sold out in no time at all and we do see the reasons behind all this fuss – because it’s worth it until the very last drop. There are no news, yet, of a fresher vintage of this wine, but we do hope that, this was not the last one to delight our senses and to ease our minds – a legendary wine indeed.

WineStatistics tasting results:

EQUINOX
Shiraz | Rezerva Vinificatorului | 2011

grape: | syrah | merlot |

region: Moldova | Stefan-Voda

overall rating: | 90.5 |

conclusion: great | a must try

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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.