CHÂTEAU VARTELY | Chardonnay | Dulce Alb | 2013
chardonnay
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Sticking to the Wine of Moldova trend and in line with the fast approaching winter holidays, we’ve decided that the time has come for a very special wine – Chardonnay Dulce Alb 2013 from Château Vartely. It is special for two reasons: this is the only late harvest chardonnay wine in Moldova that is vinified as a dessert wine, and is not labeled as an icewine, but rather as a high quality matured sweet white wine, the other reason would be that, in our opinion, this is exactly how a real late harvest wine should be made.
Let’s take a deeper look at the tasting notes and the wine’s review statistics:
Visual
The wine has a pure, geniune/citrine topaz-yellow color, with the rim color of a translucent yellow-white shade.
Olfactory
The nose is strong and quite nuanced, with no signs of wine faults. The first nose is sharp and insistent, with notes of ripe sweet fruits, jam and honey: may honey, baked apple, honeycomb, white mulberry jam, white pear, apricot seeds, white apple, white cherry, acacia flower, white peach, mango and white nectarine, all of them twisted into a delightful flavored mix, topped up with a hint of straw grass and honeyed lemon.
Gustatory
The wine is sweet to extra-sweet, with lots of residual sugar, which turns the wine into a sweet fruit syrup. It has moderate alcohol level, high acidity and soft tannin, which makes the wine taste jammy, oily and seedy-crisp. It has a good balance between all these elements, turning it into a sweet and delicious elixir. The wine has a velvety-like, smooth body with a nuanced zesty accent and a silky texture.
Aftertaste
The wine has a long finish and a velvety, sweet, seedy-crisp aftertaste – if we were to choose just two words to describe this wine, it would be ‘honeyed’ and ‘delicious’.
This is definitely a great Wine of Moldova and the overall rating says the same, with 90.6 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 has been already awarded a silver medal by Concours Mondial de Bruxelles and a a bronze medal by International Wine Challenge, two of the most influential wine tasting contests in the world of wine, which is a great start for any Wine of Moldova. Also, we would like to mention that this is an amazing dessert wine indeed, it can be served as an aperitif or as a dessert drink after the main meal and it pairs amazingly well with stilton cheese and with bitter-sweet gorgonzola, pear and arugula salad. This is a wine that will leave no prisoners, you either love it or hate it – our appreciation is definitely on the love side. We would also like to highlight that this is a classic, late harvest chardonnay wine – it is hand harvested late into the harvest season, when the grapes are starting to raisinate, which decreases the water level in the berries, leading to a more sugar concentrated grape juice.
CHÂTEAU VARTELY
Chardonnay | Dulce Alb | 2013
grape: | chardonnay |
overall rating: | 90.6 |
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.
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