1997 Pingus

Peter Sisseck came to Ribera del Duero by way of Bordeaux in 1990 (his uncle Peter Vinding Diers made a career as a winemaker in the Bordeaux region) to make wine for Hacienda Monasterio. But the early years there were difficult (please refer to page 17), and even after the excellent 1994 vintage Sisseck had little to show for his time and effort there. Then his buddy Jean-Luc Thunevin of Chateau Valandraud gave him a piece of advice: make a name for yourself in the region real soon, or quit. The result was Pingus, a wine made from four parcels of low-yielding old vines that has quickly become one of a handful of internationally sought collectibles from Spain, due to its high quality and scarcity. Sisseck objective from the outset was to make "an unmistakably Spanish, terroir-driven wine . . . a garage wine."x000D x000D x000D x000D I tasted the various components of the highly promising '98 from barrel in Sisseck's tiny cellar in the village of Quintanilla de Onesimo, as well as the previous three vintages of this wine. A couple months earlier, Sisseck had shown me the same four vintages in New York. Pingus is 100% tempranillo. Sisseck retained 30% of the stems for the '95, but has destemmed completely since then. Fermentation takes place in stainless steel (except for the '97, which was done in an upright wood fermenter), after which the wine is racked into Darnajou barrels, the same barrels used to make such Bordeaux superstars as L'Eglise-Clinet and Petrus. Racking is kept to a minimum: generally in March, again before the next harvest, and a third time a month before the bottling, which takes place the second June or July.x000D x000D x000D x000D x000D Pingus is a hugely rich, sexy wine with relatively low acidity, substantial alcohol and very high levels of ripe tannins. While tannin readings were elevated in '96, says Sisseck, they were nearly off the charts in 1995-in fact, measurably identical to the tannin levels of the 1975 La Mission Haut Brion, according to Sisseck. "I've largely substituted tannins for acids for the aging of the wine," explains Sisseck. "And I've filled up [buffered] the tannins with high pH and alcohol." While it is too soon to know how these wines will age, the '95 and '96 are developing at a snail's pace. Incidentally, Sisseck has 26 barrels of '98, but will probably ultimately leave 7 or 8 of them out of the grand vin