The winemaker at Château Palmer

Jon Wyand braves the February cold to capture an image of Thomas Duroux

- Jon Wyand

If one is used to images of the Médoc with its vines in full leaf and neatly trimmed gathered round a distant château, then to arrive in the village of Margaux as I did, on a bleak February afternoon flanked on either side by monochromatic rows of skeletal brown vines under a sky that could be described as poetically as you like, but was still a gloomy grey, was slightly depressing. Until another shade of grey dotted among the strips of dull green grass caught my eye. I stopped to take a better look at what seemed to be sheep among the vines, as if Margaux had been transported to an English moorland.