"I rule out making wines in Priorat because much of it has slate soil, and that's not my specialty."

BarcelonaThe prestigious Danish winemaker Peter Sisseck, known for his Pingus and Flor de Pingus wines (DO Ribera del Duero), priced at over a thousand euros, rules out "making wines in Priorat because the Catalan designation of origin has a good portion of slate soil," given that he specializes in limestone soil. However, he confesses that he has considered it on occasion and, although He knows that the DO Montsant does have limestone soil, but he also rules it out..

In addition to the Ribera del Duero DO, Sisseck makes wines in Jerez and Bordeaux, and he claims these three are enough for him. The winemaker visited Barcelona, ​​invited by the wine shop and distributor Vila Viniteca, for the Advanced Tasting, that is, to taste the newly produced wines—from the 2024 harvest—which will not be released until 2027. The event took place at the Lonja de Barcelona and also in the DOQ Priorat and Álvaro Palacios wineries.

Sisseck, as a Bordeaux winemaker, asserts that he doesn't want the same thing to happen in Spain as is happening in the French city. The fact is that in Bordeaux, since the 1980s, a dynamic of wine sales has begun that focuses on a professional figure who stands between the winegrower, the oenologist, and the market. These are the merchants, as Sisseck calls them, the wine merchants who buy freshly made wines (they can also age them, that is, mature them in barrels) and then put them on sale. In fact, if they perform both functions, then they are called livestock merchants"For winegrowers and some producers, it was a good idea because it made them forget about sales, since they'd already been paid, and then their concern was the next harvest," Sisseck explains. It was a system that worked if everyone in the chain could make a good living, but three years ago, that's no longer the case, to the point that "in 2024, legendary Bordeaux wines will be sold at the lowest prices in history, well below what some Spanish wines cost," Sisseck affirms.

The reasons for the great Bordeaux crisis

This is so for several reasons. For starters, because the wineries began to implement an aggressive pricing policy. "They started selling them more expensively and gave little money to the merchantsAnd also because of global circumstances: the world's two largest export markets, China and the United States, have stopped buying the quantities of wine they used to years ago. In fact, China now produces wine and has become the world's fifth largest producer, so it no longer needs to buy as much as it used to. The US is immersed in tariff politics, with a truce on the percentage that ends on July 15, when the European Union and the North American country must have agreed so that the initial threat of 200% does not come into force. wines without going through the merchants, that is, without intermediaries, because they consider that this way the system is more transparent. What's more, they also prevent the big wines from selling them only merchants.

The consequences of all this are that Bordeaux wineries this year have large stocks of wines they haven't sold. And that's why they're selling at prices they'd never imagined. "This doesn't happen in Spain, but I think it's good to know, to know what's happening in other nearby wine-growing regions, because it's a way of preventing it," says the Danish winemaker, who adds that this crisis hasn't affected him because he's never wanted to play the yo-yo game of prices, going up and down. These wines are selling at the lowest prices in history. These include Château Lafite Rothschild, Château Margaux, Château Haut-Brion, and Château Cheval Blanc.

To continue, the winemaker addresses the global consumption trend of white wines and also non-alcoholic ones "They are pendulum movements, which in a few years will pass and we will return to red wines, but to fruity red wines, which are not as powerful as those of before," he says.

As he says this, the journalist writing this has to interrupt the recording and the conversation several times because people who pass by and recognize him ask to have their photo taken with him. "I feel the affection of the people because they tell me they like my wines," he comments. It's precisely this love that people transmit to him that leads him to say that "he has achieved all the dreams he had." That's why he wants to continue as he is now, with a biodynamic agriculture winery integrated into nature, making the wines he likes and continuing to be a good leader for the workers. "I started in 1990 in a very small winery as a worker, and it wasn't until 1995 that I made my wines; the first, Pingus, then Pingus en Flor, and then PSI." The interesting thing about the names is that Pingus is the name Peter is known by his family. In fact, "first, the family called me Pin, but when I went to work in France with an uncle also named Peter, then we were two Pins, and I started to be called Pingus." The name PSI refers to the Greek letter PS, and prices range from 30 to 40 euros, far from the four-figure price of Pingus, made with Tempranillo grapes from old vineyards.