A young man from Madiran who, at 15, washes bottles and analyses samples at a Bordeaux wine merchant: that is how the career of the man later called the father of modern oenology begins. At Calvet, Émile Peynaud met the chemist Jean Ribéreau-Gayon; together they developed methods of analysis to check the wines the house was buying. After the war Ribéreau-Gayon brought him to the University of Bordeaux, where Peynaud took his doctorate in 1946 and taught into the 1970s. His laboratory became the most important address in wine science.
Spring in the barrel
What Peynaud found sounds obvious today. Growers knew that a red wine “worked” again in the spring after the harvest and grew softer, but took it for a second fermentation of the sugar or for a disease. Peynaud and Ribéreau-Gayon showed that bacteria turn sharp malic acid into mild lactic acid, and taught people to understand and steer this malolactic fermentation rather than leave it to chance. He likewise insisted on picking grapes truly ripe, sorting out rotten and unripe berries, controlling fermentation temperature, keeping barrels and cellars scrupulously clean and not forgetting the wine in cask for years. At a time when Bordeaux often tasted thin, green and faulty, this was a revolution.
To drop at the apéro
If a Bordeaux no longer tastes of green stalks and no longer “works” in the bottle each spring, that is the doing of a man who started at 15 as a lab boy at the merchant Calvet.
The first flying winemaker
As a consultant he was the first “flying winemaker”, long before the term existed. Château Margaux, Latour, Lafite and, in time, dozens of estates in France, Spain, Italy and elsewhere called him in. Peynaud himself said he never sold a recipe, only listened, tasted and explained why a wine tasted the way it did. Even so, critics soon spoke of “Peynaudisation”: wines that grew softer, fruitier and more approachable, and more alike. The debate of style against terroir, fought later around Michel Rolland, trained at the same Bordeaux faculty, began with him.
A language for taste
His book Le Goût du vin of 1980 turned tasting into a teachable discipline, with a vocabulary that growers, merchants and drinkers could share. Anyone who goes from eye to nose to palate at a wine course today, names acidity, tannin and body and calls a wine “harmonious” is speaking Peynaud’s language. For the Swiss drinker his legacy is in every well-made red, Ticino Merlot or Valais Pinot Noir included: ripe, clean fruit without green edges.