What is that guy doing? He has just poured a teaspoon of La Fontaine de Coincy Bas-Armagnac 1988 into his right hand and is vigorously rubbing his palms together. As if in surrender, he holds his hands aloft and invites an innocent bystander to smell them. It's a technique to assess purity, learned from a perfumier from Grasse, he explains. His palms bear no smell of alcohol nor esters - the sensation is pure and ephemeral. The armagnac, made in the French region of the same name, is his first baby. His second child is perhaps even more interesting, for former lawyer Henri-Bruno de Coincy lives next door to Chateau Petrus. He owns and operates, at the two-hectare Chateau Belle-Brise, the only organic vineyard in this burgeoning neck of Bordeaux, and he makes spectacular wines. They sell for 20 per cent of the price of the wines of his illustrious neighbour and about 15 per cent of the price of the widely feted Le Pin, from the Pomerol district of Bordeaux. Why doesn't he go for the big bucks? Because, he says, he wants 'normal' people to be able to enjoy this pedigree of wine. He sells direct rather than through a middleman so he can control the marketing policy, and counts top Parisian chefs - Alain Ducasse, Guy Savoy, Joel Robuchon - among his clients, in addition to French President Nicolas Sarkozy. It is not a throwaway comment when he says wine is his passion - he is so respectful of it he does everything as naturally as possible. He makes wine without adding yeast and without clarification or filtering, and ages it - uniquely - in 400-litre barriques from Armagnac rather than the regular 225-litre size. Everything is done by hand, including harvesting, which takes place on a single day. Sometimes Belle-Brise is the first property in the region to harvest and sometimes it is the last. De Coincy makes the decision based on his daily walks around the vineyard - he tastes the grapes until he believes they are optimally ripe. Despite their being vastly different tipples, de Coincy's armagnac and his red wine have something in common: the sheer quality of their aroma. The nose of his 2002 bordeaux - a difficult vintage - is beautiful, smelling not only of flowers but also of the earth in which those flowers grow. One can almost sense the organics too. The 2004 follows suit with an earthy, truffle-tinged nose and some floral notes while the 2005 is all soil and pepper, but with a similar prettiness underneath. These wines, with a classic Pomerol blend of 80 per cent merlot and 20 per cent cabernet sauvignon, cannot be called feminine but they show a beguiling power. Chateau Belle-Brise is available in Hong Kong from Vins de France (tel: 2803 5760), which receives a 50-case allocation each year out of a total production of 800 cases.