Brian Viner: Country Life

Over the past few weeks, I have touched upon the pitfalls of living in a big old house in the country - the cost of heating it, repairing it, etc - but I wouldn't want to gloss over its manifold pleasures.

For example, before we moved to rural Herefordshire, there was no room in either my house or my life for hobbies. In truth, I wasn't into hobbies even as a boy. I was obsessed with sport, but by hobbies I mean making or collecting things - something that never floated my boat.

It would have been unfloatable anyway, had it been a model boat. I had friends with marvellous Airfix models dangling from their bedroom ceilings, but I only ever made one and it was such a disaster that I never tried again. It was supposed to be a Spitfire but it was basically a large ball of dried glue with a small propeller attached.

For a while, encouraged by my mother, I also collected stamps, but I wasn't much cop at that, either. Those fiddly little hinges became the bane of my life, ending up everywhere except on the backs of the damn stamps.

Country living, however, has hobbyfied me. I have become downright anal about the vegetable garden, and the conservatory is full of dozens of precisely labelled seed-trays. Anyone who wants to see the loving, gentle side of my nature is sure to find it in the conservatory. When I say: "How was your day, darling," there's a good chance I'm talking to one of my children, but a similarly good chance that I'm addressing a Little Gem lettuce seedling.

And yet, like everyone with hobbies, I am fickle. Over the winter, when not much was happening in the vegetable garden and there were no seedlings to fuss over, I spent a lot of quality time in my wine cellar, with the result that my 1989 Vouvray is at least as precious to me as the Little Gems.

Quite often I go just to take a look at it, safe in the knowledge that no other member of the family dares to set foot down there on account of the bat that sometimes likes to whizz around the light bulb.

Before we arrived in this house, I enjoyed drinking wine but didn't collect it. But then I found, in a cellar I didn't even know we had when we moved in, a pair of characterful wrought-iron wine racks with room for about 150 bottles. I resolved to fill them with a combination of everyday stuff and decent vintages for keeping and, moreover, to teach myself some basic oenology.

The only trouble with wine is that the more you learn, the more you want to learn. My bedside table is practically a shrine to the works of Jancis Robinson and Hugh Johnson.

I read with rapt fascination my colleague John Lichfield's recent article about the 2005 vintage in Bordeaux, which according to most experts is likely to become one of the all-time greats, if not the all-time greatest. I am trying to persuade Jane that buying some 2005 Bordeaux in barrel, or en primeur, might be a tasty investment in more ways than one.

But it would be disloyal of me to write about wine without mentioning Broadfield Court vineyard, the home of Bodenham English wines, which lies only a couple of miles south of here. Herefordshire is less illustrious wine country than Bordeaux, but no Château Lynch-Bages was ever made with more care than Alexandra and Mark James, the owners of Broadfield Court, lavish on a Bodenham Reichensteiner. And never mind 2005 in the Medoc; it seems likely to be another decent vintage in Herefordshire, too.

Apparently, 2003 and 2004 were crackers, although 1982 - another of the great Bordeaux vintages - is still winced about at Broadfield Court, where a late May frost wiped out the crop. Now, if they anticipate frost in May, they light fires around the vineyard so that a pall of smoke will act like a blanket over the vines. It sounds primitive, but if the wind conditions are right, it works.

And speaking of wind conditions, it's time for me to go and sow a few pulses. I'll be back in a fortnight's time. Cheers.

'Tales of the Country' by Brian Viner is now out in paperback (Simon & Schuster, £7.99)