Dominio de Pingus

Dominio de Pingus is the Ribera del Duero estate that Peter Sisseck, a Dane trained in Bordeaux, founded in 1995 after several years as technical director at Hacienda Monasterio. Everything hangs on old Tinto Fino (Tinta del Pais, the local strain of Tempranillo) around the village of La Horra, on limestone-rich clay and gravel. Pingus itself is selected from two parcels planted in 1929, Barroso and San Cristobal. Flor de Pingus draws on a wider spread of old-vine plots in the same village, part owned by the estate and part farmed under long-term agreements with local growers.

Sisseck was an early convert to biodynamics in the early 2000s, and keeps a dairy herd so the estate can make its own composts and preparations. The cellar work is deliberately plain: hand harvest, spontaneous fermentation with indigenous yeasts in upright wooden fermenters, and only the minimum racking during elevage. New oak, which was heavy in the first vintages, has been walked back steadily since.

Alongside the two estate reds he makes Amelia, a single-barrel bottling from a parcel of very old vines, and runs PSI, a separate project that buys fruit from local growers at prices meant to keep old bush vines in the ground.