I know I ought not to do this, but I just can’t help it. Whenever I think of grape varieties, the red ones always emerge as male (dark and masterful, siring assertive, forceful wines) and the white ones as female (fragrant and poised, giving birth to wines of finesse, elegance and charm). The analogy seems ineluctable, somehow, despite the total irrelevance of gender to plant variety. And it makes today’s hero a heroine. Albeit one built on a Wagnerian scale, as we’ll learn in a moment.

We almost lost her. When French students were ripping up paving stones in Paris in 1968, poor old Viognier was on her deathbed, having dwindled to a mere 35 acres for the whole of planet earth. They all had their roots in the gritty granite terraces of the northern Rhône, where they fought daily with apricots – and the apricots were winning. That, though, was a low point, and since then Viognier has come storming back like a Valkyrie with her dander up. Now she’s a ‘grape of the moment’, yet another ‘new Chardonnay’, and much in demand (in dollop-sized portions) to add to Shiraz to render it sexily fragrant.

And she makes my heart beat a little faster. Not always – since high-yielding clones of Viognier, grown like mushrooms and milked like Fresians, means that even this charmer becomes just another couch-potato white. But at best … at best Viognier (especially when called Condrieu) makes a white which, slopped into a glass at the end of a warm day, can hold you entranced for half-an-hour or more, sniffing repeatedly, as if each noseful was music, or storytelling, or time travel. Apricots, ironically, would be the fruit, despite that long history of enmity; there’s cream, too; and flowers – flowers most of all: heavy, heady flowers, Streetcar-Named-Desire flowers like freesias and jasmine and gardenia. Rich in the mouth, of course, with precious little acid but lots of glycerine and alcohol and apricot flesh, and saturated with perfume even there.

Food partner? Forget it. When you find a great Viognier, it is best with itself alone, filling its lungs like a nightingale in June and letting rip all over you. And that, all you little wannabe grape varieties, is the way to do it.