Last Easter when we came down here, the tiny irises and daffodils up on the hill beside the old road were barely starting, and we’d to wait till we were on the point of leaving for home to see the slightest sign of foliage on the vines. And there was still mimosa in bloom, which I’d never seen before. Of course, it had been a very severe winter, and everything was way behind, and this year Easter is as late as it can get. When we went looking this morning, the daffodils and dwarf irises had been and gone. The cistus is blooming like mad up on the hill, together with the broom and the poppies, and a few big irises.

A lot of the vines are in good leaf, though a few are still stick-like, presumably because they were pruned late. Every year a few vineyards remain weedy, unploughed and unpruned. One would have to enquire locally, but my best guess is either that they have been abandoned because the owner is no longer capable of the hard work involved in maintaining them, or that the economics no longer make sense, given the costs involved in changing to a better approach to vinification. There’s no doubt that the region has adapted its approach to wine growing in recent times. The great lake of carignan that used to flood the Languedoc-Roussillon region is most definitely no more: carignan can make excellent wine, but not on the industrial scale that used to prevail when it was grown for sale by the carboy as vin ordinaire. As Jancis Robinson once put it so well, never did spitting come more easily. These days, our favourite growers mix in a good proportion of syrah and grenache, plus occasionally a bit of mourvèdre and even cabernet-sauvignon. I’ve even seen varietal wines of the region labelled ‘shiraz’ in the UK, which seems shocking (in that they use the variety name used in the new world rather than the French ‘syrah’). But perhaps it’s closer also to the original Persian name of the variety.

We went into the grotty shop in the market town this morning after we’d done our food shopping. It’s one of those ghastly places with a concrete floor and acres of brightly coloured ready-made curtains, artificial flowers and lurid plastic crockery. But it also sells good stuff like WD40 felt pens, salad spinners and glass scrapers that take Stanley knife blades. The last mentioned made short work of the build-up of tar on the window of the wood-burning stove just now. Maybe because it had been left to dry for six months, of course. I think I may already have mentioned that, if your heart’s fondest desire is a metre-diameter paella pan, this is the place to go. And they’ll also sell you the outsize gas ring to go with it.