PATRICIA ATKINSON'S left hand holds her tea cup gracefully near her face as she speaks. She holds her right hand at the same level on the other side of her face, the thumb pointing up and wrapped in a knob of worn bandages.
A week after catching the digit in a car door, she still elevates it in the thumbs-up position to reduce pain. As she leans her elbows on a coffee table at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui, the Englishwoman's hands highlight the pragmatism behind her sophistication as leading French winemaker and author.
'The French have a great saying that they use for lots of things: there are advantages and inconveniences in everything. They don't say, 'good things and bad'. They say, 'advantages and vague inconveniences'. That's the difference between French and English.
'It's true in life, really: take the good with the bad and get on with it.'
Overcoming adversity has seen Atkinson, 53, sell her wines and the story behind them around the world. She arrived in Dordogne, southwest France, in 1991 with her then husband, who dreamed of running a four-hectare vineyard called Clos d'Yvigne with a few hired hands.
But when the first red wine harvest turned to vinegar, wiping out their finances, her husband returned to his job in England, where he was diagnosed with the auto-immune disease systemic lupus.
