DAVINO | Rezerva | 2012
cabernet sauvignon | merlot | feteasca 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.

Through wine, nature enshrines the memory of a passing year.

The wine we are going to review tonight is a living legend – Rezerva 2012 by Davino. Located in Dealu Mare – the most famous wine region in Romania – Davino represents the very essence of its terroir. The vineyards, spread across four hills, proudly bearing the region’s quality stamp by exploiting the maximum potential of this area. Rezerva is the winemaker’s flagship wine that is produced only on the best vintages – a blend of cabernet sauvignon, merlot and feteasca neagra, aged for 16 months in new romanian oak barrels, followed by a 30 months bottle maturation period. Considered by many as the best wine blend of Romania, this is an elegant, dense and enormously concentrated wine, that is mixing power with finesse. But enough theory, on to the tasting!
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Take a look at the tasting notes below and our detailed assessment of the wine:

Visual
Deep and noble ruby color with pale copper shades towards the rim of the glass.

Olfactory
The nose is strong, filled mostly with ripe black fruits flavours: black cherry, ripe blackberry, blackcurrant, black plum, black mulberry, marionberry, big leaf black tea, ripe sour cherry and cherry tree wood. An instant later the nose is filled with elegant notes of black pepper, nutmeg, anise, tobacco, red pepper, roasted oakwood, vanilla and some nuanced hints of cinnamon.

Gustatory
The wine is extra-dry, with high alcohol level, high acidity and fine tannin. It feels noble, elegant and velvety, with an extracted body and a quite nuanced fruity accent. This is a complex, flamboyant and very appealing wine, which has a clear new-world profile with nuanced hints of vanilla and cinnamon. The wine has a good overall balance as it feels seedy and tannic with subtle oaky notes and a fine tannic grip on the palate.

Aftertaste
It has a long finish and a velvety, ripe and quite seedy aftertaste.
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This is definitely a great Wine of Romania and the overall rating says the same, with 94.7 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 in its prime form – definitely ready to drink now or saved for further bottle ageing – a wine that is about as elegant as elegant red wine can get to – dense, extracted and amazingly concentrated, mixing power with finesse. It has already developed into a genuine, fully mature wine that offers an explosion of black fruits and ripe tannins and, in its current state, it can stand for another 2 or 3 more years of bottle ageing. This wine is surprisingly versatile and can pair well with a wide range of cuisine, yet in order to complement its elegance, we would recommend to pair it with smooth textured meaty dishes like for example a blue rare filet mignon steak with pepper mix. Noroc!

WineStatistics tasting results:

DAVINO
Rezerva | 2012

grape: | cabernet sauvignon | merlot | feteasca neagra |

region: Romania | Dealu Mare

overall rating: | 94.7 |

maturity: in its prime

conclusion: excellent | (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.