PURCARI | Freedom Blend | 2014
bastardo | saperavi | 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 today was released as an act of protest against Russian economic and military intervention in the three East-European countries: Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. As a result, the three grape varieties that make the blend originate from those countries: bastardo, saperavi and rara neagra. Today we will review the third generation of a wine, that was not dedicated to winemaking, but rather to politics – a bottled manifest of solidarity for those countries that are literally under the fire – Freedom Blend 2014 from Purcari.
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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 velvet-garnet towards the rim.

Olfactory
The nose is strong, filled mostly with red fruit: red currant, ripe blue plum, red apple, rose hips, black cherry, and some hints of nutmeg. An instant later comes secondary and tertiary notes of red pepper, leather, cherry seeds, roasted oakwood and some hints of cloves.

Gustatory
The wine is medium-dry, with high alcohol level, high acidity and ripe tannin. It tastes seedy and green, with a nuanced woody-leathery profile. This is a sharp, rough and quite tart wine, with overwhelming acidity and mouth-drying tannin. The wine has a fair overall balance and a quite nuanced spicy accent.

Aftertaste
It has a medium finish and a balanced, acrid and a bit austere aftertaste.
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This is definitely a fine Wine of Moldova and the overall rating says the same, with 89.8 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.

Conclusion: this wine is still too young to drink now, as its acidity and tannin are yet to austere and rough at the moment. We would recommend at least two more years of bottle ageing so that it would settle down a bit. Young as it is, this wine has been already awarded a bronze medal by Decanter World Wine Awards and a silver medal by International Wine & Spirit Competition. We would strongly recommend to pair this wine with meat and fat-rich dishes, like for example rib-eye steak or pork steak. And remember: keep the dish spicy and fat, to counter balance that high acidity and rough tannins in the wine.

WineStatistics tasting results:

PURCARI
Freedom Blend | 2014

grape: | bastardo | saperavi | rara neagra |

region: Moldova | Stefan-Voda

overall rating: | 89.8 |

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.