TOHANI | Principele Radu | Merlot | Anul II | 2011
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.

Tonight we are going to review a wine we were searching for such a long time and at long last we found it – Principele Radu Merlot Anul II 2011 from Tohani. This is a single varietal merlot wine, which is usually regarded as the underdog to cabernet sauvignon, but make no mistake here – merlot is first class, one only has to find the right bottle. This particular wine was created specially for the Royal House of Romania, made in a ‘pure’ Bordeaux style, with overripe red fruit and moderate use french barrique in order to add extra complexity to the final wine – a wine meant to express excellence and tradition, but enough with the theory, let’s get straight to the tasting.
___________________________________________________________________________
Take a look at the tasting notes below and our detailed assessment of the wine:

Visual
Deep and flamboyant garnet color, with bright but opaque ruby hues towards the rim of the glass – a very noble and elegant color.

Olfactory
The nose is strong, filled mostly with ripe red fruits: ripe sour cherry, cranberry, overripe sweet cherry, wildberry, wild cherry, ripe red plum, red currant, roasted oakwood, nutmeg and dried cranberry. An instant later the nose is filled with notes of leather, game meat, cherry seeds, raw veal meat and some subtle hints of acetone.

Gustatory
The wine is extra-dry, with high alcohol level, high acidity and ripe tannin. It feels noble, woody and elegant, with a nuanced fruity-savory accent. This is a round, complex and quite extracted wine, which has a nuanced old-world style all over it. The wine has a good overall balance and it feels round, crisp and fine.

Aftertaste
It has a long finish and a quite velvety, bitter-seedy aftertaste.
___________________________________________________________________________

This is definitely a great Wine of Romania and the overall rating says the same, with 92.1 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 wine that has just reached the summit of its prime form – firm, noble and round, with a nuanced fruity accent and well integrated ripe tannin. It is that kind of wine, that will easily stand for another 3 to 5 years of bottle ageing. This is a fine example of an exceptional quality merlot wine – it’s the style that makes merlot great again on the mappemonde, despite its reputation as the underdog to cabernet sauvignon. For the best experience, we recommend to pair this wine with a filet mignon steak with garlic herb butter or some tournedos rossini steak with truffles and foie gras, as the later one is an epic pairing indeed – you just need to try it at least once in a lifetime. Noroc!

WineStatistics tasting results:

TOHANI
Principele Radu | Merlot | Anul II | 2011

grape: | merlot |

region: Romania | Dealu Mare

overall rating: | 92.1 |

conclusion: excellent | (a must try)

___________________________________________________________________________
(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.