PINTIA Tempos Vega Sicilia - Toro 2018 Bottle

Description

Pintia 2018 is a compelling Toro that exemplifies the region's richness and complexity. It showcases ripe black fruits, including blackberry, cassis, and plum, interwoven with hints of spice, graphite, and minerality. The Wine Advocate praises it with 95 points, highlighting its depth of flavor and concentration, while emphasizing the silky tannins and lively acidity that lend finesse and balance. Wine Enthusiast awards it 94 points, noting its complex and well-knit fruit with a fresh, silky palate. Jancis Robinson scores it 17 points, describing its deep purplish crimson hue and sweet, chocolatey start, balanced by good energy and a dry finish. This vintage embodies Pintia’s signature structure and offers excellent ageing potential alongside immediate enjoyment.

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THE WINE ADVOCATE 95 points
Drink Date: 2020 - 2026
The 2016 Pintia comes from a cooler but drier vintage, and the wine has a little less alcohol and more freshness. It fermented in oak vats and matured in mostly new and mostly French oak, but this year they used a little more American oak with the idea to increase density. 2016 was an atypical year in Toro; they had plenty of time to pick the grapes with lower alcohol and wines with more elegance. This is clearly a more elegant vintage than 2015. The wine has some notes that took me to the Northern Rhône, and the oak is neatly integrated—it seems to get better integrated in cooler years. There is a mix of black and red fruit that denotes good freshness. The palate is medium-bodied, with a distinct lack of rusticity and density, and it's more fluid. It has abundant, chalky and fine-grained tannins and a supple, long and dry finish. 230,032 bottles, 6,517 magnums and some larger formats were produced. It was bottled in May 2018. - Reviewed by: Luis Gutiérrez

WINE ENTHUSIAST 94 points
A slightly oxidized nose opens up to well-knit fruit and earth. Lithe, fresh and silky, but truly complicated as well. What's most astonishing is how sleek the palate is–everything seems to be right in place. Delicious today but with plenty of room to grow, this absolutely deserves to be in the astute collector's cellar. — Brandon Borcoman

JANCIS ROBINSON 17 points
100% Tinta de Toro (Tempranillo). Winemaker Gonzalo Iturriaga: ‘I like the wine but the harvest in Toro is challenging because the grapes ripen too fast. Though 2018 was cooler than usual and therefore easier. It’s at 750 m elevation, between Rioja and Ribera with just 1,000 vines per hectare, all bush vines. The sandy soils mustn’t touch the fruit, otherwise it will burn it. The grapes get a little cold soak. Then there’s 10–30% malo in barrel. More US oak than in Rioja. There is much less gross-lees contact and stirring of them than in the past. They key point is the harvest date.’ They pick Toro first, then Rioja and then Ribera, which tends to start before the end of the Rioja harvest. According to Iturriaga, Toro used to be difficult to sell but now it’s their first new release to sell out.
Very deep purplish crimson. Sweet and chocolatey start but with good savoury grunt underneath. Good energy and rather dry on the finish. Very Spanish! Some freshness rescues it from over-richness. (JR)