Patricia's feeling vine in France

An Englishwoman has broken into the exclusive world of French wine and is creating a stir from her tiny vineyard. Patricia Atkinson, 50, swapped her life as a bank employee in London for that of a Dordogne vigneron in 1990.

She started out with only four hectares in the village of Gageac Rouillac, an hour from the city of Bordeaux. She is now selling to top City wine bars and her produce is garnering fulsome praise from some of the leading writers on the subject.

"One of my favourite wines of the year so far," wrote Robert Joseph in the Sunday Telegraph.

Miss Atkinson, from Windsor, is almost a one-woman wine industry. "I do everything. I plant the vines, I harvest the grapes, I tread them and I drive tractors," she says.

She even sells her produce under her own Clos d'Yvigne label. "The name is a pun on the word 'divine'," she says.

Wine writer Joanna Simon of the Sunday Times found the name particularly appropriate. She particularly liked Miss Atkinson's barrelled dry white which she described as "beautifully defined, crisp yet rich". Her colleague, Anthony Peregrine, gushed: "Her Cote de Bergerac reds and especially Saussignac sweet whites are as good as these things get."

From the smallholding of four hectares, Miss Atkinson has expanded to 21 and she now employs one full-time worker.

"After increasing my capacity by two-thirds, this year for the first time I will be selling wine from this new batch. The first to go on sale will be my 1998 red wine," she says.

Not only does Miss Atkinson sell to the prestigious John Davy wine bars in the City, her clients include wine merchant James Nicholson in Dublin and customers in Japan.

Simply breaking into the wine business is a major achievement - not least because Bordeaux is the heartland of one of France's most prestigious wines. Miss Atkinson is based in a modest stone-built French farmhouse which dates from the late 17th century.

Though the setting is old world she is employing the latest techniques to sell her vintages, including her own website, cdywine.com.