Dominio de Pingus, Peter Sisseck 2016

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 tasted an unbottled sample of the 2016 Pingus, which is still in barrel and due for bottling in August 2018. The different barrels had already been blended and put into the same barrels after the last racking three days before I encountered it. It has all the baby fat and is tender and primary, but you can sense the harmony and subtleness, the freshness and elegance it should develop, as the Ribera perfume is already incipient there. I couldn't help but think of the 1996, one of my favorite years. It's less concentrated than the 2015. It's also a little less ripe, and it probably has a tad less alcohol and more power. It's solid, but at the same time, it feels weightless; it has the inner strength and the subtleness of a ballerina. There should be some 7,000 bottles of this. This 21st vintage of Pingus might be one of the best ever, a modern version of the 1996...