They had eaten in silence, waited on by the only woman in the house, Maurizio’s teenage daughter Lisa. Back in the cellar, the long-maintained silence continued. It was not an empty silence, the void remaining once everything sayable has been said, nor yet the relaxed stillness which implies an intimacy or familiarity such that speech has become an irrelevance. This silence was tense with unspoken thoughts, facts and opinions not alluded to, a mutual reticence about things better left unsaid. It could be defused only by activity — filling mouths, or bottles.

The only light, from a single forty-watt bulb attached to a huge beam in the centre of the ceiling, died a lingering death in the lower reaches of the cellar, as though stifled by the darkness all around. The only sounds were repetitive and mechanical, muffled by the wooden casks mounted on wooden trestles which lined the walls. For lack of any other distractions, odour had it all its own way — an over-whelming profusion of smells fighting for prominence like plants in the jungle: yeast, mildew, alcohol, damp, fruit, corruption, fermentation. Their luxuriant variety created an olfactory arena whose dimensions apparently far exceeded those of the cellar itself, and this sense of concentration, of too much crammed into too little, gave an almost choking intensity to the musty reek which filled the lungs of the trio working silently in the gloom.

The division of labour had been established years before, and remained constant. Gianni Faigano, the elder of the two brothers, took the bottles from the rack of wooden pegs where they had been turned over to dry after being washed and sterilized. He filled each with a stream of red wine from a plastic tube inserted into one of the barrels, then passed the bottle to his brother, who positioned it under a metal lever loaded with a cork, which he rammed down into the opening. Maurizio then handed the bottle on to Minot, a neighbour who came by every year at this time to help out with this chore by applying the labels and capsules.