get the last of the roots of the worn-out vines out of the soil and burned and the soil turned good and deep. And then the urgent work can begin.

It's a time of constant meetings, phone calls, huddled conversations, exchanges of gossip, guesses, forecasts, bets. Hail . . . the viticulturist's dreaded enemy . . . has struck the vineyards in Tuscany, splattering and shattering whole bunches of grapes, whole fields of vines: long faces at the Tuscans' bad luck, with perhaps just a hint of schadenfreude because, after all, those Tuscans, with the magic name of Tuscany at their back, sell wine of no greater excellence than ours for five times the price.

When will the vendemmia start . . . how's it looking in the rest of the country? Up in the north they are already bringing in the grapes for the vino spumante, the fizzy stuff which demands low acidity and alcohol no higher than nine degrees. In Sicily, after a roasting summer like this one, no rain for 30 days and fierce, dry heat for months now, the vendemmia is set to start on Wednesday . . . 10 days earlier than usual.

Everywhere in the wine lands of the Mediterranean, the hottest summer for 400 years has put the wine men on their mettle.

It's another 2003, they say, another summer where the public cursed the relentless heat, the bone-dry forests went up in flames and the Canadair planes dumped their millions of litres of water, and the pundits terrorised the population at large with their premonitions for the pitiless, desertified future. And the wine men nodded absent-mindedly at the terrorising chat and the terrifying predictions . . . but all the while a quiet smile played around their lips.

Because while 2003 was a brute of a year for the old and the poor . . . the thousands of pensioners who died in France for lack of proper care, the thousands of hectares of trees reduced to smoking stumps . . . it was a hell of a year for the wine. Poco ma buono, as they put it tersely here: sparse but good.

Anzi, buonissimo. Not good, bloody brilliant.

Anyone who knows anything at all about wine knows to look out for the magic year "2003" on the label.

Don't shout it out loud . . . because no year is a good one until the wine is in the cellar . . .

but 2007 is looking to be better even than 2003. It has been fiercely hot for months now, but without that pitilessly dry, hot spring we had four years ago. With the mildest of winters . . . a winter that hardly happened . . . morphing into a warm, wet spring finished off by a classic Mediterranean high summer of blazing azure skies and hot, hot sun, all across southern Europe the grapes have plumped and coloured at record speed. The tasks that pile up during the summer months have to be dispatched at record speed now.

The vendemmia is at hand!

Few places in the world are more in harmony with the world of grapes and wine than the little town of Cori, 50km south of Rome, a venerable cluster of ancient stone houses that brims from an indentation in the steep slopes of Monti Lepini, girded by the ancient town wall. Cori existed as far back as the 8th century BC; looking down from the town walls two millennia ago you would probably have seen a very similar landscape of vines and olive groves, punctuated by pines, cork oak and chestnut, stretching away to the broad dark band of olive trees that marks the town boundary. "Cori is older than Rome, " says Marco Carpineti. "They were minting money here before Rome. But Rome had better luck."

Or did it? What better luck do you need than this, to remain intact in the year 2007 behind your medieval town walls, a community of 10,000, deeply steeped in grapes and olives and allied trades. Carpineti's house stands atop an ancient temple, already old when Augustus ruled in Rome. The house dates from the 17th century, "though it's only been in the family for 200 years".

But Cori is not merely old, it has also found the wherewithal of renewal. Take Marco Carpineti, for example. The vineyards have been in his family for generations but until 1986 he worked for the local council. Then he chucked in the job and took up the family trade but after some years decided to go the organic route, banishing insecticides and fertilisers. He also adopted other traditional methods and ideas, such as doing critical work only when the moon is waning.

In 1997, after three years of work, the authorities gave their official approval. "Our organic methods are more rigorous than the industry norms, " he points out. "We don't use herbicides, chemicals or synthesised products of any kind. We control wild grasses with regular mowing and a gentle working of the land."

Carpineti joined an army of organic producers: Italy, he claims, is the biggest producer of organic wines . . . and of organic agricultural products in general. "Around 8% of all Italian farms are organic, " he says.

The Slow Food movement, which champions organic farming, was founded in Italy and continues to give vital support to those, like Carpineti, who have gone the natural route.

Carpineti is helped by the fact there is no problem with insects in this area; a mild ailment afflicts some of the leaves of the vines but has no impact on the quality of the grapes, which benefit from Cori's perfect situation. "It's absolutely perfect for the cultivation of the vine and the olive, situated on the slopes of the Lepini hills with a southwest exposure, with a fresh summer and mild winter climate, " says Carpineti.

The volcanic soil is rich in mineral salts, which give a good body to the wines.

Carpineti's champion wine is Dithyrambus, a red that is a blend of nero buono and montepulciano, named after the chant sung in honour of the god of wine . . . Dionysus (in Greece) or Bacchus (in Rome) . . . by his drunken acolytes, accompanied by flutes and tambourines. "Dithyrambus '01 is a generous, graceful, harmonious wine redolent of autumn leaves and giving a nicely tannic finish, " according to Slow Food's Italian Wines Handbook 2006. Carpineti's other star, Moro '04, a white made from two varieties of Greco vines long-cultivated in Cori, has, according to the same handbook, "a soft, pervasive aroma of summer flowers, and awakens the palate with its sinew, lean yet rounded, and long-lasting eloquence".

Neither are wines you will have heard of, unless you are passionate about the subject;

they are exported to Britain and a few other countries but his last British distributor recently went out of business ("But he paid for every bottle, " Carpineti noted) and they cannot be easy to find. But they are not expensive: his cheapest wine is 6 in the Italian shops, his most expensive only 15. And Slow Food's high praise is justified.

There are seven or eight wine producers based in this small town, including Carpineti, and despite their small size and the increasingly fierce competition from new wine countries they seem quietly confident about the future. Nazareno Milita, president of the Cincinnato Cooperative Agricola, Cori's biggest wine maker, explains why.

His plant processes the grapes of Cori's smaller growers but also produces distinguished wines with the Cincinnato label, especially the red Nero Buono. "It's difficult for our wines to become famous because we produce such small quantities, " he says.

"We produce 100,000 bottles of Nero Buono a year, of which half goes abroad, to Japan, Korea, Germany, Britain, Denmark and the USA. It is a local grape that nearly died out because it is susceptible to disease. But we felt it was a good wine with strong potential and highly specific to this region so, 15 years ago, we started a programme of research and recovery, and succeeded in restoring it to health using new technology. We took a bet on it but it has done well because it coincided with the demand for a greater variety of wines."

That's the reason why cheap Cabernet Sauvignon from Romania or Chile does not cause Milita or Carpineti to lose sleep. "We're enjoying a spell of growth, " says Milita, "and we have the potential to grow more. The reason is because we have lots of different wines. France has great wines and they have gone all over the world . . . and that is what is now making French producers vulnerable to competition. Our appeal by contrast is a rejection of standardisation.

"The regions that are emerging as forces in wine are not those that are merely copying the French but those like us that have something to offer of their own, as well as being competitive in price. It is wine for wine lovers rather than the mass market but we are doing fine."

Marco Carpineti and Nazareno Milita may seem to be in competition but they give every sign of being the best of friends.

The tour of the vineyards over, I pleaded early deadlines and said I must rush to the computer. But you don't do that in wine country and we ended up in Da Checo, a trattoria with a courtyard shaded by vines in the heart of Cori, with a bottle of Capolemole 2006 (by Carpineti) and Nero Buono 2004 (Cincinnato) before us, to accompany the linguini served with a sticky sauce of tomatoes and olives.

Outside it began to rain. It had been clouding up all morning and by the cheese course it was pelting down. Milita and Carpineti glanced out complacently. "They need some water, " Milita shrugged. "It hasn't rained for 30 days."

A few showers of rain will make the grapes yet sweeter and fatter, even closer to the ideal of the perfect vendemmia of which wine growers dream. Just as long as it doesn't turn to hail. . .