Ten minutes after we’d installed ourselves in the chalet Colin knocked on our door with a complimentary bottle of High Wycombe Cabernet Sauvignon. Twenty minutes after that Angela turned up with a bottle of High Wycombe White Port. When Colin next appeared it wasn’t to give us wine but to tell us that they would be grape-crushing early the next morning and to hope that we weren’t light sleepers. But Angela, on her final visit, resurrected the tradition of which we had started to become fond and let it lightly be understood that, were we to be thinking of staying another night, they would be thinking of having us to dinner. Colin’s Whitehill Crusher looked like a cross between a sewing machine, a giant liquidizer, and an old-fashioned mincer. It was worked by a rubber fan belt which turned blades similar to those on a lawnmower. And it was loaded by hand – Colin taking turns with Angela to stand in the back of a semi-trailer and toss in the grapes with a pitchfork. According to Colin, a Whitehill going at full pelt could pulverize twenty tons in an hour; so it will be clear from the time it took Colin to crush his grapes – two hours for three tons – that there was no sense of urgency at the High Wycombe Winery. Dressed in their oldest clothes and wellingtons they squelched thigh-high in fruit, pausing from their pitchforking to squabble, or to listen to the valley echoing with Sunday church bells, or to discuss such matters as the future of liberal education in Australia, and the relative merits of the city and the country. As regards the latter, they believed that living in the Barossa gave them the benefit of both worlds – the calm of Bethany to hand, the vitality of Adelaide a two-hour drive away. ‘It was never our intention to become country bumpkins,’ Colin told me.

When he thought Angela wasn’t listening he took me into his confidence about the quality of the grapes. ‘Not been enough rain,’ he said. ‘They’re as dry as a Marseilles prostitute.’ Only he pronounced the place Marsails, as I suppose everybody does in High Wycombe. Fortunately I was already familiar with the gross Australianism. ‘As dry as a nun’s nasty’; so I found Colin only marginally indelicate.