RADACINI | Icewine | Riesling | 2017
riesling

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 an ice wine, which is in fact a subtype of dessert wines – Icewine Riesling 2017 by Radacini. Ice wines are one of the treasures of the wine world – made from grapes that are left on the vines to freeze deep into the winter, thus the sugar content increases due to dehydration and frost. Technically, any grape variety can be used for the production of ice wines, yet there are some varieties that excel more than the others and riesling is one of them – in fact it is the most popular grape variety for producing ice wines, mostly due to its natural high acidity. But enough with all that 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
Straw-yellow color with pale, hy-yellow shades towards the rim of the glass.

Olfactory
The nose is rich, filled mostly with sweet fruit flavours: yellow pear, lemon, yellow apple, apricot, hay, quince, straw grass, yellow mirabelle, green pear, meadow, wild pear, wild apple, marguerite daisies, acacia flower, wild flowers, honey and some very nuanced hints of lemon zest.

Gustatory
The wine is sweet, with high alcohol level, high acidity and firm tannin. This is a fresh, light and zesty dessert wine with an appealing, fruity-herbal profile. It tastes crisp, sweet and seedy, with quite nice balance on the palate and a touch of alcoholic warmth showing through on the mouthfeel.

Aftertaste
The wine has a medium finish and a balanced, crisp and seedy aftertaste.
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This is definitely a fine Wine of Moldova and the overall rating says the same, with 90.4 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 fine and delicate dessert wine, that is still on the rise. it might lack a bit of complexity and elegance, as it feels slightly angular and has a quite bitter-seedy finish towards the end of the plate. Our insistent recommendation is to drink it now, as long as it is still flamboyant and expressive, or you can keep it for another year or two, as sweet wines usually respond well to ageing due to high amount of residual sugar and high acidity. In order to elevate the wine’s aromatics, we would suggest to pair this one with light dessert dishes, like for example crème brûlée or panna cotta. Cheers!

WineStatistics tasting results:

RADACINI
Icewine | Riesling | 2017

grape: | riesling |

region: Moldova | Valul lui Traian

overall rating: | 90.4 |

maturity: on the rise

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.