Does wine have a gender? There was a time when tasting notes would refer to a wine as feminine or masculine — a delicate fragrant chablis might be feminine but a big fruity hermitage from the Rhone would always be masculine.

For some reason 2016 seems to have had a higher proportion of celebrity deaths than usual, and this month two well-known wine names could be added to the list — Louis Latour (aged 83) and Etienne Hugel (aged just 57).