(Decanter) - “I was born in 1967.  That’s what it says on the paper.  But in reality I was born in 1867.  They just put me in the Frigidaire and took me out again 100 years later.”  The time traveller is Mounir Saouma: one of the most original thinkers working in French fine wine today.

He’s obsessed with a return to past ways of working with wine – though he has nothing to do with the ‘natural wine’ movement, and indeed derides “the ayatollahs, the fanatics of everything” who produce zero sulphur wines “which stink of the shit of a horse.  I’m sorry, it’s natural, but I cannot drink it.”  He doesn’t have much time, either, for the “biodynamic blah blah blah.  Is it yummy?  Are you enjoying? Are you finishing the bottle?  Will you drink it the day after or not?  Will you feel tired or not?  Will you feel like a butterfly the next day?”

These are his desiderata, and his means of achieving them is by ensuring “that all the things that nature gave us are still in the wine.  The proteins, the vitamins, the yeasts, the bacteria, the skins: everything that nature gave us is still inside the wines.  They are digested.  They help your system digest other things.  The wines are full, not empty.”