EQUINOX | Sintagma v.1 | 2015
rara neagra | cabernet sauvignon

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 very special wine, a wine we will be talking about for a very long time – Sintagma 2015 by Equinox. The constant search for perfection makes this wine a real classic, a blend of rara neagra and cabernet sauvignon, this wine is nothing else than bottled poetry. A syntagma is an elementary constituent segment within a text and, similar to the words that merge one into another, the two grape varieties fusion into something more than a mere blend. It’s an union of elegance and finesse, where all the wilderness of rara neagra marry the complexity of cabernet sauvignon to form a marriage of flavour and structure. But enough theory, without further ado, let’s move on, straight to the tasting!
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Take a look at the tasting notes below and our detailed assessment of the wine:

Visual
Deep, but not opaque, garnet color with pale ruby shades towards the rim of the glass.

Olfactory
The nose is strong, filled mostly with overripe red fruits flavours: sour cherry, blackberry, ripe wildberry, black raspberry, blackcurrant, cherry seeds, black plum, violets, black marionberry, cherry tree wood and some nuanced hints of forest floor. An instant later the nose is filled with notes of red wood, nutmeg, black and red pepper, black soil, sweet tobacco and roasted oakwood.

Gustatory
The wine is dry, with high alcohol level, high acidity and ripe tannin. It feels supple, seedy and grippy, with a nuanced youthfulness and a fruity-woody accent. This is a quite bold, ripe and very complex wine blend, as it tastes tannic and noble, with a well structured mouthfeel. The wine has a good overall balance as it feels fine, a bit tart and velvety, with very subtle oaky notes.

Aftertaste
It has a long finish and a seedy-tart and grippy aftertaste.
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This is definitely a great Wine of Moldova 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 is yet too young to drink now, as its acidity and tannins has to be settled down a bit – this is a wine that has yet to reach its prime form, supposedly in the next 2-3 years. Despite its youthfulness, it has plenty of tannic grip on the palate, with a quite ripe textured character on the mouthfeel and a touch of alcoholic warmth showing through. The wine has been aged for 24 months in new french oak barrels and is produced in a very limited edition of only 1800 bottles, thus the wine is a rarity even here in Moldova. We would recommend to pair it with spicy meat dishes that are rich in sweet-umami flavours, like for example tournedos rossini beef medallions with foie gras and truffles or some grilled pepper steak, so that all the angularity in the wine will be perfectly counter-balanced by the spiciness of the dish. Enjoy!

WineStatistics tasting results:

EQUINOX
Sintagma v.1 | 2015

grape: | rara neagra | cabernet sauvignon |

region: Moldova | Stefan-Voda

overall rating: | 92.1 |

maturity: on the rise

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.