No one knows exactly how many French wine enterprises are British-owned but the total must now be well into four figures. Wine, or rather the ability to drink copious quantities of it without involving the British chancellor of the exchequer in the transaction, has long been cited by the British as one of France’s most obvious attractions. It is hardly surprising then that a substantial proportion of the hundreds of thousands of Brits who own French property have been tempted by the apparently bucolic life of a vigneron.

They have mushroomed since the start of the current invasion of les rosbifs in the late 1980s but I remember sitting on a sunny terrace overlooking the Gironde at Château Loudenne in the Médoc as long ago as 1980, meeting Sue and Alan Johnson-Hill. They were then regarded as social novelties, a young British couple who had decided to apply what they had earned in Hong Kong to restoring the rundown Château Méaume in an outlying part of Bordeaux where the wines are entitled only to the lowly Bordeaux appellation rather than anything grander.