PURCARI | Maluri de Prut | 2015
feteasca neagra | rara neagra

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.

The wine we are going to review tonight is a wine with a story behind the bottle, a story about people that were forced to live very close to each other, but apart at the same time. This wine is a homage to those, who still remember who they are, those who still have a dream that one day they will become one: one blood, one culture, one nation. This is a wine story dedicated to all the Romanian people separated by the infamous Prut river, which became a border that should have never existed in the first place. The wine we are going to review tonight is Maluri de Prut 2015 from Purcari – a blend of indigenous grape varieties from the both sides of the Prut river: feteasca neagra and rara neagra.
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Take a look at the tasting notes bellow and our detailed assessment of the wine:

Visual
Deep and opaque garnet color, with shades of noble purple towards the rim.

Olfactory
The nose is rich, filled mostly with red and black fruit: sour cherry, rare beef meat, red currant, black cherry, leather, blackberry, cranberry and some hints of violets. An instant later comes secondary and tertiary notes of red and black pepper, black tea, charred oakwood, smoke and some nuanced irony hints of animal blood.

Gustatory
The wine is dry, with high alcohol level, strong acidity and ripe tannin. It tastes seedy, tannic and meaty, with a nuanced rustic-leathery profile. This is a firm, dense and quite tart wine, with overwhelming acidity and mouth-drying tannin. The wine has a fair overall balance and a quite nuanced woody accent.

Aftertaste
It has a medium finish and a balanced, bone-dry and astringent aftertaste.
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This is definitely a fine Wine of Moldova and the overall rating says the same, with 89.2 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 tannic bomb – in our opinion this wine is still too young to drink now, as its acidity and tannin are yet to austere and too rough at the moment. We would strongly recommend a couple more years of bottle ageing so that it would settle down a bit. Still, this is a wine not to be taken lightly, as it has been awarded a gold medal by Mundus Vini International Wine Award. Because of its nuanced meaty-savory flavours, we would strongly recommend to pair this wine with rare meat, like for example some grilled fillet steak or a black angus flat iron steak, as the wine’s strong acidity and those mouth-drying tannins will cut well through the irony-meaty flavours in the dish.

WineStatistics tasting results:

PURCARI
Maluri de Prut | 2015

grape: | feteasca neagra | rara neagra |

region: Moldova | Stefan-Voda

overall rating: | 89.2 |

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.