Though it cannot be argued that Vega Sicilia is the Spanish Álvarez family’s flagship winery, they have established other successful wineries including, in 2001, Pintía, in the nearby Toro wine region.
The Álvarez family are members of the Primum Familiae Vini aka PFV or the Leading Wine Families, an international association of some of the world’s finest wine producing families from France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain.
Wine has been made in the Toro region since before Roman times, with its fame spreading in the Middle Ages, when royal privileges were granted to Toro wines. Thus Pintia comes from a region with a great winemaking tradition and with huge potential to prepare high quality wines, as it has proven with the passing of time. On the banks of the River Duero itself, which flows into the sea at Porto, and a hundred kilometres from its older “brothers”, Pintia is from a zone with very hot and marked summers and a complex terroir noted for a huge amount of boulders.
The winemaker at Pintia is the same at Vega Sicilia; Xavier Ausásis. Aged for 3 years, the Pintia is a marvellous (and less expensive) younger cousin of Vega Sicilia’s splendid wines. Bodegas Vega Sicilia describes the Pintia as “young, intense and ground-breaking in nature, coming from land that gives it great character and well-roundness, both swathed in great elegance. Proud of its origin, it has managed to reinterpret the Vega Sicilia culture in an innovative, brave and daring manner, at the head of the emergence of a new generation of Toro wines.”
Robert Parker (about the 2019 vintage): “It’s a heady and ripe Pintia. They had to be careful with the harvest date, and they harvested early and quite quickly. Even though the wine is ripe and heady, with notes of grenadine and small ripe berries, it’s also exotic and spicy, quite showy, lush and full-bodied, with the 2019 tannins.” 94 Points