The chatelaine of Glenelly Hill, that Simonsberg estate that sounds like a single malt, May-Eliane de Lencquesaing, celebrated her 85th birthday while I was dining with João Nicolau de Almeida, winemaker at Casa Ramos Pinto, the Douro producer now owned by Roederer Champagne, as is May’s own Pichon Lalande. We agreed that she is a remarkable and forceful woman and well worth featuring in the upcoming Good Value Guru Diaries 2010.

I sat next to her at the Nederburg Auction 2004 dinner held at the Grande Roche (Big Cockroach to the winepress) a German-owned hotel in the winelands of Paarl. She was in fine form, with stories of how she lost her enthusiasm for international travel after it became increasingly difficult for her traveling companion, a pet monkey usually to be found sitting on her shoulder. A touch of the exotic, perhaps inherited from a Philippine grandmother, further up her family tree.

Some of her secrets are revealed in Don and Petie Kladstrup’s Wine and War, like how her family hid Jewish refugees from the Nazis during the Second World War. But when I suggested she write her autobiography (a no-brainer best seller) she cried off, saying she was much too busy. When I offered to ghost it, she said “but I don’t know you.” “Even better I replied.” But she wouldn’t be persuaded and her lips went all skinny.

On the subject of ghosts, she related how of an evening she would recount events of the day to the portraits of her ancestors which hung in the Château. “And did they every reply?” “Sometimes” she said with a twinkle in her eye.