Quincunx is not a word you come across every day. So when winemaker Simon Osicka casually drops it into conversation, I have to stop him and ask what on earth he’s talking about.

“It’s a very old method of planting,” he says, as we walk towards his four-years-young but ancient-looking grenache vineyard, where each vine is tied like a small bush to a single stake. “I got the idea from a book written by [19th-century Victorian viticulturist] François de Castella. But it goes back further than that, to the Romans. The vines are planted quite far apart in a repeated quincunx pattern, which is like the five dots on a domino, so you can plough in three different directions.”