Château Peneau

Château Peneau is the typical example of an estate that does not owe its identity to the division of seigneurial lands. It was born of the work of a few men and women who carefully chose the land and grape varieties they judged best suited to making a distinctive wine.
The name “Peneau” takes up, give or take the spelling, that of the man who owned this estate during the Revolution. On 20 November 1790, Charles Penaud, a wigmaker in Bordeaux, bought for himself and for Jeanne, his unmarried younger sister, this bourdieu from illustrious unknowns: the Jarry heirs. The house was not in good condition.
Charles Penaud and his sister refitted it and provided it with a bakehouse, a stable and a dovecote. For twelve years, Charles enlarged his estate, both at Roudey around his house and at La Petite-Lande, around the windmill where he built up a small farm. He thus acquired fourteen plots, the last two in 1802, two days before his death. His eldest son inherited the estate but died in 1820, leaving four minor children. The sale of the estate was then inevitable.
In 1822, Bernard Prévot acquired the Penaud buildings. All this, joined to the vines held ancestrally by this family, formed a wine-growing entity that competed with the great estates.
In the various editions of Cocks and Féret, this estate is called “À Roudey”.
Bernard Prévot died at the age of 84 in 1863. The estate fell to two of his unmarried daughters, then passed to a niece who sold it in 1894 to André Pargade.
His son Pierre enlarged the property and named it “Peneau” in memory of the founder of the estate.
In the absence of a direct heir, his wife sold the cellars and most of the vines to Madame Dany Douence, originally from Haux, whose husband was related to the Prévot family who ran Peneau for nearly 60 years.
Today, this vineyard, nearly two hundred years old, produces red and white wines much appreciated by a loyal private clientele.
The A.O.C. Côtes de Bordeaux red wines of Château Peneau stand out for the harmony of their purple colour and for their aromatic finesse, at once floral and fruity. Tannic but not excessively so, they are wines for long keeping.
The whites of Château Peneau, whether dry, medium-sweet (A.O.C. Premières Côtes de Bordeaux) or sweet (A.O.C. Cadillac), are generally wines offering fine, subtle and delicate aromas. Tasting reveals for each of them complex flavours, floral, fruity, even briny, which blossom and harmonise in a dazzling finish like the bouquet of a firework display.
A secret of history: a Jewish family protected during the Second World War sent M. and Mme Douence a plan of the estate where a treasure was hidden…