Flor de Pingus 2019

Robert Parker 93-95 Point.

I caught the 2016 Flor de Pingus days before it was due for bottling, so what I tasted was the final blend (done after the time in barrel was over) that was just settling in tank before being bottled. The paradox of 2016 is that it was a warm year, but the resulting wines have great freshness, which also happened in 1996 (one of my favorite old vintages of Pingus). The yields were higher, which brought more freshness to the wines; and the wines are airier and not as compact as, for example, 2015. In fact, what they have been doing for some time now is to work in viticulture—the pruning and what you do with the canopy—to achieve slightly higher yields and get the plants to balance, because as you increase the yields, the ripening takes longer. Even though it’s young, this shows amazing perfume that should bloom with a year in bottle. This has all the signals to become one of the greatest vintages of Flor de Pingus. They expect to fill some 105,000 bottles in June 2018. I already look forward to tasting this in my next round, after it has spent a year or more in bottle.

Robert Parker
The 2019 Flor de Pingus is marginally riper than the PSI and Pingus from the same vintage but still shows the freshness and finesse the cask sample showed a little over one year ago. The wine has more concentration than the 2018, and it has absorbed the oak quite well. They use maybe 20% new barrels for the élevage here. It has abundant, fine-grained tannins. It’s a powerful vintage of flor, reflecting the solar vintage, but still keeping the poise, harvesting early and fermenting at low temperature. 108,000 bottles produced. It was bottled in July 2021.