Dominio de Pingus

Peter Sisseck arrived in Ribera del Duero in 1990 as a Danish winemaker whose training at Château Pétrus had given him a framework for understanding old vine Tempranillo that nobody else in the region was applying. The first vintage of Pingus — 1995 — drew 98 points from Wine Advocate and immediately established the wine as one of the most sought-after new releases in Spanish wine history.

The estate farms old vine Tempranillo under certified organic and biodynamic standards — a combination confirmed by Wine Advocate's detailed profile of the estate. The biodynamic conversion reflects Sisseck's belief that the old vine material on clay and limestone soils in La Horra performs best when the soil biology is managed as an integrated system, and that the reduction in vine stress produced by biodynamic practice is visible in the wine's structure and longevity.

Pingus itself has drawn a perfect 100 from Wine Advocate across multiple vintages, placing it among the handful of Spanish wines that command prices comparable to the most celebrated Bordeaux and Burgundy. Flor de Pingus, the second label made from bought-in Tempranillo farmed under the same organic standards, carries the philosophy without the scarcity.

Sisseck is one of very few people to have created a globally recognised luxury wine benchmark from scratch in a region that had no prior international reputation when he arrived.