Now he is notably thinner, dashingly dressed (today in a flatteringly slim blue suit, black coat with a flash of burgundy lining and bright turquoise striped socks) and with the kind of floppy fringe that used to get you sent to detention.
The BBC's master of ceremonies will wear a black tie for the occasion, it was confirmed on Friday, avoiding the controversy generated by Peter Sissons more than a decade ago when he announced the Queen Mother's death in a burgundy number.
IT WAS Saturday evening and Yukio Hatoyama, wearing a burgundy jacket and a cocky grin, was dancing with his fun-loving wife under the bright lights of a charity fashion-show.
PARAETHYLPHENOL and paravinylphenol are two compounds essential to the flavour of well-aged burgundy.
Amid bottles of burgundy and plates of local chicken at a fête in his old constituency, Mr Montebourg denounced austerity.
To those who prefer a glass of burgundy and a cigar, that may seem hard to understand.
Britons sniffed at presumed French influence in the choice of burgundy red; and many also mourned their larger Navy-blue passports, almost unchanged since the League of Nations set the standards at the International Conference on Passports in 1920.
Tall and telegenic, the 50-year-old Socialist politician is as shameless bossing about global companies as he is charming old ladies at trestle-table picnics over bottles of burgundy in his wineland constituency.
Financial markets want "to turn us into their poodle", he lamented at a weekend fete in a bucolic village, celebrating the joys of la France profonde with copious bottles of burgundy.
Similarly, he extended his influence into Burgundy.
