| Score: |
100 WA.
"I was really looking forward to the 2016 Pingus in bottle, as the sample I tasted last time promised to be one of the best (if not the best!) Pinguses to date. Few (if any) vintages of Pingus have shown such integration of the oak, especially considering the wine is so extremely young. It has precision and symmetry, elegance and austerity à la Audrey Hepburn. This 2016 is like an updated version of the 1996, produced with a lot more knowledge that helped them find this purity, freshness and elegance. Peter Sisseck described it as seamless, and I could only agree. He also said that this is probably his ideal of what the wine from Ribera del Duero should be. The wine was kept in barrel for an extra couple of months and was finally bottled in August 2018; there were 8,100 bottles produced. It delivered all the sample promised, and perhaps a bit more... I had a calm and slow tasting of three vintages of the three wines produced by Peter Sisseck, giving the wines time in the glass to open up and express themselves. 2016, 2017 and 2018 are very different vintages. 2016 saw a good crop with lots of freshness, and the wines have great precision and elegance. 2017 was a dry and warm year marked by frost that made them lose between 25% and 40% of their grapes (they could buy other grapes to compensate the volume of PSI). And 2018 was a year with good rains in the winter, a classical year with high yields (the effect of the frost) and a warm summer that resulted in a very good year. The question is still up in the air if 2018 has the magic of a year like 2016 or not, but it's closer in style to 2016." Luis Gutiérrez, Wine Advocate #246, Dec 2019 |