We must have been drawn to Bethany, because whenever we got lost in the valley we found ourselves back there, and we returned to it again before the afternoon was finally over, deliberately this time, having failed to find anything in or around the larger centres of Nuriootpa and Angaston that we liked more. An accommodation sign swinging outside the High Wycombe Winery – the Smallest Vineyard in the Valley – had taken our attention earlier. Small was not necessarily beautiful, but anyone who had chanced calling a winery High Wycombe in such a place, where all around was Krondorf and Bernkastel, in our estimation deserved encouraging. So we drove in, not without some intimations of insobriety but hardly thinking that we were about to lose three whole days of our life to the bottle. But then we didn’t think we’d be goose-stepping around a dinner table like John Cleese or doing Australian farmyard imitations either. I still remember what the afternoon was like before the gates of irresponsibility closed behind us – the Barossa hills turning an exquisite anguished pink in the setting sun, the bells of the Lutheran churches tolling, the light being led out like an unwilling bridegroom, and grapes beneath our feet.

Colin and Angela Davis ran the High Wycombe Winery and were also teachers. Whether the teaching supplemented the winemaking or the winemaking the teaching we never found out. But the winemaking was what gave them the pleasure. The reason they’d built a brand new row of chalets for paying guests was so that Colin could afford to give up teaching. ‘In this country we pay kids to stay on at school,’ Angela told us, ‘as a consequence of which Colin, who is a science teacher, is expected to teach them practicalities such as how to post a letter and how to go shopping. It’s an insult to his intelligence.’

‘Ah, don’t start that again, Ange,’ Colin said.

He was a lean figure with a little grey moustache and a rather careworn look belied by the fire in his eyes. His accent was a queer nasal mix of Australian and whatever it is they speak in High Wycombe. A Rhodesian who had spent time in Ilfracombe and Dudley would have sounded the same. His wife’s name he produced from somewhere high up in his sinuses, fatalistically – not so much Ange as Enj.

Angela herself was strong and square-jawed. Pioneer stock. According to her own testimony the great-great-great-granddaughter of the first white woman to be born in South Australia. What an earlier generation of men would have called a damned fine woman with no nonsense about her. But she had dark flashing eyes which didn’t quite go with her pioneer sturdiness, suggesting a weakness for Spaniards somewhere back along the line between her and her great-great-great-grandmother.