Mind you, I had been drinking.

The Barossa hills were a flaming pink again when we called upon the Davises to dine that evening, the same colour as the crests of the cockatoos scavenging in the landscaped woodchip garden, and the same colour as the crisp short-sleeved sports shirt in which Colin welcomed us. He was unrecognizable from his daytime self. So was Angela. She wore a cream pleated skirt and a rich floral blouse and had applied her make-up so that her unspoken Spanish ancestry should blaze from her brow. It was hard to believe that they had been on the back of a semi-trailer only a few hours earlier, pitchforking grapes into a crusher. Only the indelible purple stain on Colin’s hands gave any clue to what they did when they weren’t entertaining. I handed him my brown paper bag with some discomfort; I wasn’t at all sure about the etiquette of taking wine to the house of a vigneron, but had rejected Ros’s suggestion that we take flowers instead, remembering my own invariable chagrin as a host when a guest presented me with a bouquet and not a bottle. ‘Aw, that’s good,’ Colin said, after the most perfunctory look at what I’d brought, ‘it’s always a good idea to keep tabs on the opposition.’ But that was the last we saw of that.

While Colin opened champagne, the whole time singing loudly to himself, Angela introduced us to her ‘dearest friends’, Franz and Vivien, who owned the Landhaus – a highly regarded restaurant which was also, with one room, the smallest hotel-motel in South Australia. On the face of it they looked an oddly assorted couple: Vivien, sedate in pearls and carefully coiffured; Franz, a cadaverous grey, with a goatee beard and wisps of white hair on either side of a central strip of baldness, his cable-knit sweater worn over his emaciation like a shroud. As if to allay any fears we might have had that he wasn’t going to make it through the evening, Angela said, ‘Franz is sometimes known as the Mad Dutchman.’

One isn’t always so lucky with people who have a reputation for lunacy, but Franz did indeed turn out to lack the usual restraints. Though he began normally enough, with stories of his experiences as a businessman/chef. ‘So I took over this absolutely run-down restaurant,’ he explained, ‘famous throughout the Barossa for its appalling décor, atrocious cooking, and unbelievable overpricing. I killed myself doing it up, changing the menu, all that – and who do you think my first customer was? A woman who’d been to it in the old days and had brought a whole coachload of people down from Queensland specifically to witness at first hand everything that she’d described to them. She was furious when she saw what I’d done. “My God, you’ve changed it!” she screamed. “I’ve come thousands of miles to see this again and you’ve changed it!”’ His next problem was staff. ‘I employed an English woman. As an assistant. Only she didn’t – assist me. I had to bribe her before she’d undertake a single task. She just wouldn’t. I had to renegotiate her wages and conditions of employment every day, before she would. Whenever I asked her to do anything she’d say, “Oh, oh, this could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.” So I had to do everything myself. She stood at the sink, her back to the business. Drying the same fork. First I took the orders and then it would be – ZIP – into the kitchen, and – ZIP – buttering the scones, and – ZIP – over to the soup, and then – ZIP ZIP – back out into the restaurant again, and – ZIP ZIP ZIP – “Here you are, madam, I take it everything is to your requirements?”’