Tasting juices at Jacky Preys (Touraine, Loire)

Jacky Preys filling a glass from atop a vat Meusnes, Touraine (Loire)
I dropped for a short visit without advance warning at the Touraine winery Domaine Jacky Preys, wondering if there were things of interest going on in mid september. Jacky Preys was there as well as his wife and he was a bit worried with a conveyor belt breakdown which prevented him to take away the pomace from under the press. His son had left very early in the morning, like 3am or something like that, to pick at the conveyor-belt plant somewhere in France the very important metal part that they had to replace urgently. A heap of pomace could be seen lying underneath the big pneumatic press and this was supposed to be fixed in a few hours, after his son would have brought back the part here.
Jacky Preys still found the time to make me taste a few juices and wines in their early stages, and this is always interesting. At some point, he walked to a big stainless-steel vat and he poured me a glass of fermenting Sauvignon vat with the tap. It tasted like it was already turning into wine, this is not an easy time to taste a wine, it's not the gorgeous sugary drink anymore and hasn't revealed its wine features yet. Plus the lees were particularly thick at the level where the tap was situated, and it made the juice more bitter. So Jacky took a ladder and filled a glass at the top to show me how different the wine/juice was there. Indeed it tasted wholly different, in part because the lees had already begun to go down and were mostly absent at the surface, it was more balanced and smooth, I would say (not sure balance is the right word at this stage). Now I could feel two different expressions of a wine in the same vat. Interesting.

Bubbling Sauvignon Domaine Jacky Preys & Son is quite a big estate now, with 75 hectares of vineyards, split between the areas of Meusnes and Mareuil-sur-Cher. Jacky makes about 10 cuvées including some interesting cuvées of Sauvignon, a variety which yields good results in the region. He also has a cuvée of Fié Gris, which is made out of a pink sort of Sauvignon and which was much more widespread in the Loire in the past. His prices are aligned with the average ones in the region, most of his cuvées costing between 4 € and 5 € a bottle at the winery.
You can see on this picture how the juice bubbles with the fermentation. Jacky Preys relies on the wild yeasts for the vinification, which translates into longer élevage before bottling compared to the average winery around here, and he uses minimal amounts of SO2. Checking Fié Gris The next Sauvignon I tried happened to be the Fié Gris, this pink-skin Sauvignon which yields white juices at the press. The wine was still quite sugary, closer to bernache, having just begun to ferment not so long ago I guess.
Jack Preys leaves the wines ferment at their own pace and on their own indigenous yeasts, and the wines are thus relased quite late compared with the norm, being routinely bottled a year and a half after the harvest. The cuvée Silex Tasting a juice in the early stages of the vinification is an arduous excercise, and I'm usually not the one who will raise the hand and say : this wine will be above the others because of this and that. But for this particular cuvée Silex which I tasted as it was already tilting on the wine side of the juice, I feel I could say something like that. This wine, beyond its exotic-fruits notes, had already a classy structure, some elegance within that made it stand out, and I was happy to feel something of that range in what was barely turning into wine (a difficult exercise). Like its name may induce, this Sauvignon comes from a flintstone-thick terroir, which gives a particularly-stricking minerality to the wine. I happen to have bought recently a case of this cuvée Silex and that's a wine that I try to always have a few bottles stock (it's also very affordable at something like 4,5 €). My wish is also to forget a case for a few years and see how it stands. The silex now on the market is the 2009, which was bottled in june 2011. The Gris de Touraine Another memorable drink during this short visit was the lovely juice which will turn out to become Jacky Preys' Gris de Touraine, a rosé cuvée made with 3 varieties : a majority of Pineau d'Aunis with also Pinot Noir and some Pinot Gris, this juice was just before its bernache stage, it was just a marvelous velvety and sugary drink without alcohol. When you drink that thing, you wonder how what is labelled as grape juice in the shops can have any link with that divine liquid.
The three varieties are harvested and pressed together (direct press), which gives a very tender type of color. Jacky Preys has been making this wine almost from the start. It's labelled under the Touraine Appellation.
This made me wonder if I somehow passed Jacky Preys' 3-Pinots rosé in my regular visits, and I'll try this Pineau d'Aunis-majority blend one of these days. It's odd that I kind of rediscover this Gris-de-Touraine wine after taking part to a harvest of Vin Gris de Joigny... Labelling machine operator Before I left, we walked by the labelling machine where a worker was busy winding the bottles from a pallet to the labelling line where they'd get their label and the bottleneck seal with the green (if in AOC) stamp. The bottles are stocked on pallets in the cold cellar and labelled/packed according to the volumes on the orders.

Comments

[Frank]

Great article. We stopped in a wineshop our last night in Paris on our honeymoon. The proprietor sold us a bottle of Jacky Preys Touraine - we brought it back in our luggage. Wonderful wine; thanks for reviving the memories.

[hikalu]

Oh, I wanna drink his wines as I see this article!!
Come to think about it, I haven't tasted them recently. oh..