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.’