Château de Pressac: Wines
Jean-François Quenin has a team of 12 people working in the vineyards and cellars, led by the technical director Yannick Reynel, and the maître de chai Bruno Chaminade, who previously worked at Château Siaurac and Petrus, alongside Jean-Claude Berrouet. Originally he employed Gilles Pauquet as a consultant, but since his retirement he has been working with Hubert de Boüard de Laforest and Alain Raynaud.
The pickers harvest the fruit into small cagettes which replaced the old panniers in 2007, after Jean-François realised the much larger hods exposed the fruit to greater risk of damage. Exactly how the fruit is handled upon arrival at the cellars has changed during Jean-François Quenin’s tenure, but at the moment it first goes over a vibrating sorting table, which allows for the removal of vegetation and other contaminants, after which the fruit is destemmed by machine. Then Jean-François employs a technological sorting, and although he trialled optical sorting in 2009 he subsequently changed to the Tri Baie machine. He concluded, after his trials, that sorting by density, rather than by colour, allows for more precision. “Optical sorting is fine if the berries are healthy, but if there is any fragility in the skin it is a much more variable process”, he says. In 2015 he has also introduced a fourth sorting, selecting according to berry size. Fortunately the courtyard and grounds at Château de Pressac are quite large, so there is plenty of room to have all these tables and sorting machines lined up leading to the entry to the cellar.
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