Thierry Puzelat: Wines
The fruit is hand-harvested by a large and willing team, many of them part of the extended family – perhaps not that surprising when you consider that Thierry and Jean-Marie are just two out of seven children. Once picked the grapes are transferred to the winery and are fermented with minimal intervention; the whites are pressed and the juice decanted off and transferred for fermentation into cask, where the wine remains on its lees until it is bottled straight from this vessel, without racking. As for the reds, whole bunches are fermented in open-topped 40-hectolitre wooden vats beneath a blanket of carbon dioxide, with pressing by foot once fermentation is underway.
The wine is then transferred into casks where, like the white wines, they remain until they are bottled without further racking. For small-volume fermentations Puzelat also has some 30-hectolitre fibreglass vats and some smaller vessels. The cellars are temperature controlled, although the vats themselves aren’t; the environmental control might help a little in damping down the fermentation temperatures though. Use of sulphur dioxide throughout is minimal, with most wines seeing no added sulphur dioxide except perhaps for a small dose at the time of bottling.
The 16 hectares of Clos du Tue-Boeuf, owned and rented, yield a number of different cuvées each year, bottled under both Touraine and Cheverny appellations.
From the 6 hectares of rented Touraine vines comes one of the best known Tue-Boeuf cuvées, Le Buisson Pouilleux. Although not declared as such on the label (the Tue-Boeuf wines are all denoted by name of vineyard or related nomenclature, and varietal labelling is eschewed – although I have seen the variety mentioned on one or two older vintages) this is 100% Sauvignon Blanc.
Please log in to continue reading: