EQUINOX | 5 Elemente | 2014
chardonnay | feteasca regala | feteasca alba | babeasca gris | pinot gris

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.

Tonight we are going to review a wine a bit unique in its own way, as it is a white blend that is made of 5 different grape varieties. Blending is a technique widely used in winemaking that is meant to improve the overall balance of the wine. Usually there are only two or three varieties used in a blend, but sometimes, on very rare occasions, there may be more, when a certain level of complexity is meant to be achieved. But enough theory, we present you the wine we’ve chosen for the review tonight – 5 Elemente 2014 from Equinox.

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

Visual
Pale yellow color with shades of topaz-yellow towards the rim.

Olfactory
The nose is rich, filled mostly with sweet fruit mixed with some herbal flavour: oak-tree bark, wild apricot, underripe white cherry, fresh oakwood, underripe hazelnut, straw grass, apple seeds, asparagus, wormwood, daffodil flower, a bit of vanilla and some subtle hints of butter.

Gustatory
The wine is medium-dry, with high alcohol level, moderate acidity and quite strong tannin. It tastes green, woody and herbaceous. This is a quite tannic wine, as it feels muscular, dense and austere – not the regular everyday wine you may have been expected. The wine has a fair overall balance and a seedy-rough palate, as this is a quite big and extremely bold white wine.

Aftertaste
The wine has a medium finish and a balanced, bitter-aggressive aftertaste.
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This is definitely a good Wine of Moldova and the overall rating says the same, with 88.0 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.

Conclusion: this is a hardcore wine, not the regular crowd pleaser, a wine that is definitely over its top form. Its body and profile is closer to an orange wine than to a white wine, as it feels quite astringent, angular and vegetal, thus we would not recommend to keep it any longer for bottle-ageing. What we would strongly recommend is to pair this wine with food, where zestiness and spiciness will be the two major keys to a successful pairing. Tart and spicy sea food dishes will do very well with this wine, like for example fresh oysters served with tabasco sauce and lemon, peruvian ceviche or some langoustines served with lemon & pepper butter, as the tannins and high alcohol content in the wine will be counter-balanced by the tartness and spiciness in the food.

WineStatistics tasting results:

EQUINOX
5 Elemente | 2014

grape: | chardonnay | feteasca regala | feteasca alba | babeasca gris | pinot gris |

region: Moldova | Stefan-Voda

overall rating: | 88.0 |

conclusion: good | 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.