All might have been well, even then. He had always been good at moving silently and at speed, and could easily have slipped through the rows of vines to his left and then worked back the way he had come. But Anna had scented the extraneous presence. Restrained by the leash, she couldn’t bound forward and investigate and so, as dogs will, she began to bark. The figure concealed in amongst the vines straightened up and turned towards him.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’

There was no reply.

‘Didn’t you see the signs on the fence? “No trespassing,” it says. Do you know what that means, or are you illiterate on top of everything else?’

The dog stood between them, looking from one to the other as though uncertain which side to take, which one to defend and which to attack. Then the man who had brought her took the initiative, walking forward at a slow, confident lope, his right hand gripping his sapet, the adze-shaped mattock used to unearth truffles.

That was how it began.

‘Barolo, Barbaresco, Brunello. I am a purist, Dottor Zen. I also happen to be able to afford that classical austerity which is the ultimate luxury of those who can have anything they want. In wine, as in music, the three Bs suffice me.’

‘I see,’ said Aurelio Zen, who didn’t see anything except the bins of bottles stretching away into the gloomy reaches of the vast, cold, damp cellar, its vaulted roof encrusted with a white mesh of saltpetre.

‘Barolo is the Bach of wine,’ his host continued. ‘Strong, supremely structured, a little forbidding, but absolutely fundamental. Barbaresco is the Beethoven, taking those qualities and lifting them to heights of subjective passion and pain that have never been surpassed. And Brunello is its Brahms, the softer, fuller, romantic afterglow of so much strenuous excess.’