The curved wooden staves of Clos Apalta jut out of the rolling hillside like a barrel, merely hinting at the flurry of activity going on in the seven-floor gravity fed winery carved 35 metres down into the rock below. Finished in 2005, it is the pièce de résistance of an ambitious project by Grand Marnier heiress Alexandra Marnier Lapostolle and her husband Cyril de Bournet: to make Old World Bordeaux blends that would put this New World region on the map.