OLD Git and his blonde - and admittedly sexier - better half, Old Tart, are much younger than their increasingly famous caricatures suggest.

The zany labels have now also spawned a website, www.oldgitwine.com in which both characters star in downloadable cards, toys and games.

The feisty couple, representing the remarkable revolution that's taken place in Britain's wine-drinking habits, were born just a few years ago, "on a rather boozy night" in, of all places, that bastion of French orthodoxy, Bordeaux.

The man behind one of the most successful "Old World" wine brands in Britain is Paul Boutinot, who started importing wines in the back of a van but whose Gatley-based company has major interests in vineyards in France and South Africa, plus a stake in Spain and Italy.

But successful as the Old Git and Old Tart brands have been - and there are others, including Paul Boutinot's premium Signature range, which bears the name of their Stockport-born maker writ large on the bottle - they are far from being a gimmicky way of shifting plonk. Boutinot explains: "The idea came when a dozen of us were having dinner in a brasserie in Bordeaux during Vinexpo, the major trade fair. We were discussing the fact that companies like ours weren't really brand orientated when the reality was that the overwhelming majority of consumers only retain a memory for very few wines.

"The whole idea of wine brands really took off in the New World. In Australia, three companies dominate the wine industry and the biggest-selling brands in Britain are Australian and Californian."

The question was where in Europe could produce large volumes of high quality wine at a relatively low cost from old vines, the Old World's ace card, which would deem many of the tricks of the New World trade - like using powdered tannins, tartaric acid and oak chips "in order to fill holes" - unnecessary.

The answer for the red wine was the grenache and syrah grapes grown on the slopes of Mont Ventoux on gnarled old vines, many planted a century ago, near the mouth of the River Rhone in the south of France.

"So what would we call it that would reflect the age of the vines?" says Boutinot. "It was actually someone called David Vaughan, formerly a buyer for Cellar, who said: `Why not Old Git'.

Everybody laughed. And because everybody laughed we know it wasn't offensive, just fun."

With a local design company coming up with the artwork, the brand was born. Old Tart, made from the rare terret grape sourced from near "a lagoon" near the resort of Cap d'Agde, has a very different appeal.

Ninety-nine point nine per cent of it is bought by women for women, according to Boutinot; it's the classic hen party tipple. It's a brave man these days that dares take the Mickey out of a woman.

So how does a bloke from Stockport end up running his own major wine producing and importing company?

Boutinot's father, a native of the Loire region of France came to England during the war, fleeing the Germans via St Malo. Under the auspices of the Free French forces, he trained as a paratrooper at Ringway Airport, as it then was, in Manchester, and, as a member of the SAS, he remained based at Ringway throughout the war. Afterwards, he married a local girl - in what turned out to be a curious Anglo-French family coincidence.

Says Boutinot: "My father was billeted with my mother's uncle who, during the First World War, had married a French girl."

The couple went into the restaurant business and owned La Bonne Auberge in Heald Green - ironically just a mile from Boutinot senior's wartime Ringway base - for 27 years.

After working in his parents' restaurant for about 18 months, Boutinot decided to start a wine business with his savings of '3,000, using contacts in France and fetching wine back to the UK in the back of his Citroen Safari.

He sold it to restaurants in the Manchester area, then in London to top clients like Robert Carrier and La Tante Claire, setting out from home at 5am to complete the round trip in a day.

He claims he's a major beneficiary of the wine-drinking explosion, not one of its architects: "When I started, wine was drunk by professionals, not ordinary people, and the trade was a business for the elite, usually kept in families and handed down from father to son.

"But almost as soon as I arrived, the whole thing grew - my timing couldn't have been luckier and I hung on to its coat tails.

"It's pretty difficult not to succeed in an industry that's growing rapidly."

Boutinot dismisses the term "winemaker" as a New World term, but it's clearly what he does. We buy in grapes and vinify them; we've hardly any vines of our own, that's not our game," he says.

"We influence the growers, largely by paying them - they are farmers, of course - then our role is to blend from different tanks to make a drinkable wine with as little intervention as possible.

"I believe in natural balance and, if you have good grapes, the role of the person making the wine should be just to oversee the transformation, not to start adding this, that and the other just to fill in holes." Tweet