The vendemmia has now been completed, with the grape juice now fermenting in the 54 litre demijohns.

Thanks to the good weather, and despite the occasional visit from the caprioli (deer) into my small vineyard, I had a bumper crop – some 600 litres compared with 250 litres in previous years. Quinto, the previous owner of some five years ago, showed me the basics of how to make wine.

Mind you, they were the basics. Everything went into the vat, stalks and all with little or no decanting the juice off the lees (dead yeast).

No wonder it tasted and smelt like rotten eggs. However, after a little research I have refined my techniques, if only to show that the English can also make good wine. Had a little accident though.

Eddie, the newly acquired cat, fell into the partly full vat where my wife was crushing the white grapes.

Apparently he leapt out almost as quickly as he fell in. She did ask me if we ought to throw away the 50 litres of juice and start again. To which I immediately pointed out that he had not been in the vat long enough to add to it.

On the contrary, he took juice out. Fortunately he is still only a kitten, a short haired one at that, so I probably only lost half a litre. Had he fallen into the red grapes, he would have come out looking like four sticks of candy floss.

I suppose we ought to pay more attention to Health and Safety matters, as well as Public Health.

However, the wine is only consumed by us; together with family and a few special friends and they are not likely to know about Eddie's dip in the vat.

Eddie is so named because he was abandoned in the local edicola. He was only about ten weeks old then, but still managed to climb behind the paneling above the bookshelves, where he spent one night trapped. My wife, with the assistance of Brid, the owner, had to take down some of the boarding to retrieve him.

We didn't intend to keep him; however, little kittens do look cute. It's only afterwards when they start to cause havoc that we question the wisdom of adding another cat to the two we already have.

Although he is still only five months old he has already used up two of his lives.

People often ask me what on earth I do with all the wine. Well, Quinto always had a recycled plastic water bottle full of his wine when he came to show me the ropes some four years ago, and he is over eighty years old and going strong.

He always pointed out that the vino was not strong, which was his excuse for drinking it all day long. He is Italian, of course, but it might just work on the English.