Producer profile: Dominio de Pingus
Its ascent to elite status was a rapid one, but over the course of 25 years, this Ribera del Duero estate has steadily maintained its reputation for excellence, becoming a staple of the collector market. David Williams meets its founder, the Danish don of
If you listen to the man responsible for its existence, the success of Spain’s most celebrated cult red wine is almost entirely down to forces beyond his control. Fate, good fortune, the right place at the right time... these are the motifs in Peter Sisseck’s story of how he came to hit the jackpot with his tiny-production Ribera del Duero in the mid-1990s – and how it continues to command some of the highest wine prices in Spain, a quarter of a century later.
But if it’s true that there’s something a little implausible about the story of Dominio de Pingus, then it’s also true that its telling might prompt the listener to pull a kind of reverse Lady Bracknell. To have one successful wine project may be regarded as fortunate, to have two (or three) looks, well... might it be that Sisseck deserves some credit himself?
The Pingus legend starts with Sisseck’s background, far from the vinous mainstream, in Denmark. But if his industrialist family ‘were not wine buffs, or “five-bottle men”’, Sisseck says, they nonetheless liked wine. A precocious interest soon developed. ‘Some people collected stamps; I collected wine labels.’
Bordeaux inspiration
One family member helped turn the boyish collector’s impulse into something more serious: Sisseck’s uncle, Peter VindingDiers, was a respected consultant winemaker in Bordeaux, and it was during childhood visits to the region that Sisseck developed an idealised vision of the wine-grower’s life.
‘It was very glamorous,’ Sisseck says. ‘Not in a château-ish way, but it was cultured; just the conversation. I met people like Anthony Barton, who are icons today. Suddenly I saw something I wanted to do.’
Not quite ready to leave his family and friends in Denmark, Sisseck studied agricultural science in Copenhagen rather than go to a winemaking school overseas. ‘I’m happy that I didn’t get programmed,’ Sisseck says. ‘I was blessed to be a free-thinker, not to be dogmatic.’
Still, he was soon learning the specifics of wine in Bordeaux – before fate intervened again. ‘29 June, 1990: I was on my way to California. I believed that one time in your life you should go west, my boy, so I was quite keen to try my luck there. Paul Draper [of Ridge Vineyards] kindly offered me a job, but I couldn’t start until after August. In the meantime, I was offered the opportunity to go and look after a newly planted vineyard in Ribera.’
Spanish scene
That project, Hacienda Monasterio, ‘was an incredible opportunity. The idea was to make one of the most truly vineyard-based wines. We didn’t want to buy grapes, it wasn’t a revolutionary thing [in the world] – but it proved to be very revolutionary in Spain, and still is.’ Sisseck never did make it to Ridge, and celebrated 30 years with Hacienda Monasterio in 2020, though his involvement is much reduced these days. ‘I live next door,’ he says. ‘Now and again I pop over and kick their asses! I’m not hands-on, but I will help with the blends and vinification, and the bigger picture.’ His years setting up the project provided a crash course in the local conditions at a crucial point in Ribera del Duero’s development. As Sisseck says, while wine production in the region predates the Romans, its more recent (post-medieval) history had, with one important exception, been one of isolation and decline. ‘Rioja has much more of a developed wine tradition. Ribera was – is – the New World.’
The exception, of course, was Vega Sicilia, with whom Sisseck worked closely, sourcing vines and sharing resources while developing the vineyard for Monasterio. The 1980s had seen the beginnings of a renaissance throughout the region, albeit not one without its issues.
‘It started off really nicely in the beginning,’ Sisseck says, ‘with smallsize wineries, 30,000 cases volume, most of them having their own grapes or [sourcing them from] very good neighbour friends, old
‘I’m happy that I didn’t get programmed. I was blessed to be a free-thinker, not to be dogmatic’ Peter Sisseck
vine-based.’ Large-scale, ill-advised and poorly executed planting soon took its toll, however. ‘In 10 years, it had turned into one of the most badly done vineyards in the world.’
‘Rioja has much more of a developed wine tradition. Ribera was – is – the New World’
Peter Sisseck
Going solo
With Spain entering one of its periodic moments of intense economic crisis in the early-to-mid 1990s, and with the 1993 Monasterio vintage ‘not exactly flying out of the door’, Sisseck, by now married with two young children, began to worry about his livelihood. ‘Would I still be in a job in a day or two?’
But he was still convinced of the area’s potential. ‘Talking to my friends in Bordeaux, they said, “Why don’t you make a wine for yourself?” It was the time of the garage movement, of course, and in travelling around the area I’d got to know the region, and [the village of] La Horra I liked very much, with its big concentration of old vines. I wanted to make very pure Tinta Fina, with no technology: a small project, very old vines, let the wine make itself, natural yeast.’
And that’s exactly what he did. On what he calls a ‘gravelly tongue’ of land over a claylimestone foundation in a ‘sea of silt’ in La Horra in the middle of Ribera del Duero, he found a 4.2ha vineyard planted with bush vines in 1929, effectively in two plots separated by 500m. ‘The wine I made from there became Pingus 1995. I had never tasted anything like it and that was really special,’ Sisseck says of that first 12-barrel production.
He showed it to Vinding-Diers, who was impressed and advised him to sell it en primeur on the Bordeaux Place. ‘Everything was aligned,’ Sisseck says. Bordeaux was in an optimistic mood after a series of difficult en primeur campaigns, and Sisseck’s friends were able to get the wine to the big critics – Stephen Tanzer, Michel Bettane, and, crucially, Robert Parker all loved it. ‘It went ballistic. It wasn’t planned; there was no business plan. It was the first time that this thing had happened to a Spanish wine.’
In late November 1997 came the event that established Pingus’ place in wine legend. The year had started off badly for Sisseck as it was, with frost wiping out any prospect of a Pingus vintage. Then a ship containing 75 cases of Pingus 1995 – nearly a quarter of the total production, destined for the US market – sank in the deep Atlantic off the Azores. A disaster it may have been, but demand for the wine in the US suddenly soared, and the net effect was that the bottle price more than doubled to some $450 – and a star was born.
The evolution
Since that explosive first vintage, ‘everything and nothing has changed’, says Sisseck. The vineyard remains the same, although it has transitioned to biodynamics and has been divided into five sub-plots, reflecting the subtle gradations of sand and clay.
Thanks to global warming, there have also been changes in the way it is managed. The yields are higher and the harvest is, generally speaking, earlier, both being decisions imposed by the behaviour of the vines rather than the dogma of the winemaker.
‘Harvesting earlier is not necessarily a choice: you have to work towards it, as the vineyards become better balanced,’ Sisseck
explains. ‘We have been working them for 25 years now – they are very fit old men.’
According to Sisseck, the warming climate has also influenced work in the cellar. Up until 2004, the policy was to use 100% new oak, understandable since the 1995 vintage had been made that way as he ‘had to buy everything new’, and why change a winning recipe?
Then came 2005, ‘the first very warm year’. He says: ‘One of the first things I noticed was that with slightly higher alcohol, the impact of the new barrel felt more intense. Alcohol itself is a high extractor, so 12% alcohol will taste less woody than 15%. In 2006, we started experimenting with wood. It took me a while, but by 2012 we weren’t using any new wood – we use 12-month-old used barrels.’
Other wines
The source of those used barrels takes us to another chapter of the Pingus story. First produced commercially in 1996 in response to Sisseck’s American importer, who ‘wasn’t content with the small quantities we could give him’, Flor de Pingus is the ‘village wine’ that sits alongside the Pingus ‘grand vin’.
‘It’s not a second wine, it’s the “other” wine,’ Sisseck says, stressing that it has always used different vineyards: until 2004 the grapes came from a vineyard rented from a neighbour of Vega Sicilia; since 2005 it has its own four sites covering 30ha in La Horra, including a small proportion of Garnacha.
Inspired by the lushness of Pomerol Le Pin, Sisseck says he still looks for ‘that sexiness’ in Flor, which today uses 25% new oak.
The Burgundian model extends to Sisseck’s third Ribera project, Psi. Sisseck’s ‘regional’ wine, Psi was conceived in the mid-2000s as a means of conserving Ribera del Duero’s oldvine heritage, much of which was sacrificed to a local scheme that sought to make highly fragmented vineyards easier to farm by concentrating them into larger, contiguous plots.
‘I could see why the scheme was going on, but at the same time, a lot of the vineyards were really great and it was sad to see so many being pulled out,’ Sisseck says. ‘In the eastern part of Ribera, they hadn’t been through this concentration. I thought we could help them get a good return out of their old vineyards, but they had to be compensated properly.’
The success of his project meant Psi’s production soon outgrew the slightly ad-hoc winemaking facilities, which by 2016 were spread across the wineries of seven different co-ops. Psi’s purpose-built winery now makes 350,000 bottles a year, from 800 plots of ‘mostly old vines’ covering 200ha, and including one-tenth of the old vines in Ribera.
From Ribera to Jerez
Sisseck likes to describe himself as a ‘specialist in limestone’. And his latest collaboration with the owners of Hacienda Monasterio cements the idea: a fino Sherry-focused project
based on two vineyards (2ha in the pago Macharnudo Alto and 8ha in pago Balbaína) planted on some of the best historic sites in the limestone soils of Jerez.
For Sisseck, this is the consummation of a desire to make a worthy white wine partner for Pingus in what he believes is Spain’s greatest white wine region and idiom. It also connects perfectly with his work in the limestone soils of Château Rocheyron, the St-Emilion estate that he co-owns.
Sisseck’s interest in the soil is not merely academic. Like many of the best wine-growers of his generation, he has a deep and longstanding commitment to biodynamics. And he clearly relishes the idea of connecting Pingus to an older tradition. ‘When you think of Janasse and all the great guys in Côte-Rôtie, they were farmers, they had apricots; the old châteaux were farms, they were working farms. A vineyard is not sustainable in itself. We have to try to understand it as part of a bigger ecosystem.
‘This cult of wine that we’ve had for the last 20 years, I cannot deny that I’ve benefited greatly from it,’ he continues. ‘But sometimes it saddens me a bit. I recently read a lot of books by Hugh Johnson, one of the true greats, and refreshingly he makes wine belong to a tradition of culture and doesn’t solely focus on just the wine itself.’
And so he turns to his latest project. ‘We’ve been making cheese,’ Sisseck says with a smile. ‘We need to start making something from the cows.’ Queso de Dominio de Pingus? Something tells me that may be one to watch.