When the Italian red appeared, even my students started quoting Horace

Italian culture is a local product. It celebrates family, city and region; village ceremonies and village saints; local virtues, local vices and the local dishes that produce them. Its root assumption is that it is best to be where you are, and hurrying onwards is dangerous. Maybe it all began as a reaction to Roman imperialism. Wasn't it Horace who wrote that "C lum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt" - which is to say that travel narrows the mind? But the culture has been updated, and now has a distinctly trendy image. The Slow Food Movement began in Italy. The Slow Work Movement no longer has a serious competitor there. And the Slow Drink Movement can be witnessed in every Italian bar.

True, those mad Australians are planting their global varietals and showing the natives how to produce wine that sells anywhere to anyone. But the local grapes survive and are as dear to those who grow them as the saints who guard the vineyards and the grannies who guard the saints.

One remarkable varietal is the Aglianico, planted in the Vulture region of Apulia since pre-Roman times. This intense red grape, grown on volcanic soil roughly 500 metres above sea level, in a climate of extremes that few of the global varietals could tolerate, produces a dry wine of remarkable complexity. Matured in barrels for 20 months, it is best kept for a few more years in bottle, when it clears from ruby-red to Tiepolo garnet, with all the scents of the sun-baked hillside contained in its smooth embrace. It is a wine for celebrations, for those noctes cen que deum - nights and feasts divine - that Horace invokes in fragrant verses that share the charm of his native grape.

Horace would no doubt have stayed drinking the wine of Apulia, had his ancestral estates not been confiscated after he fought for Brutus against Antony. The vineyards have suffered periods of neglect since Horace's day, but are now restored to glory, with the century-old firm of D'Angelo taking the lead in producing what must surely be one of the most seductive reds to come out of southern Italy. You can obtain D'Angelo's Aglianico del Vulture from Alivini, a wholesaler in Leeds (tel: 0113 244 1144). It is a full-bodied wine, beautifully balanced, with the tannins in the background and the fragrance emerging like incense before the long procession of fruit.

It proved the perfect accompaniment to dinner with my teenage protegees in Edinburgh, where they are studying. I feared that my tutorials would have been obliterated by university, the purpose of which, after all, is to teach Oasis, The Prodigy and David Beckham. But no - when the bottle appeared and the glasses were filled, "Nunc est bibendum," they said in unison, which is as far as they ever got with Horace.

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