A Dinner for Marie Zélie

Some invitations you accept before you've finished reading them. A dinner at The Runholder in Martinborough, a table of good friends, and the release of a wine called Marie Zélie, we were in the car over the hill before the RSVP had properly sent.

Marie Zélie is Martinborough Vineyard's flagship, a reserve Pinot Noir made only in the years that earn it, so a release is a genuine occasion rather than a date on a calendar. But it was the name that undid me. She was real: Marie Zélie Hermance Frere, a Frenchwoman who arrived in the Wairarapa in 1882 and planted thousands of vine cuttings to make herself a piece of home on the other side of the world. A century later, the wine carries her forward. I can't think of anything more Fareham than that, a woman, a long way from where she started, making the place she's in feel like hers.

To plant a vine is to bet on being here for the harvest. She planted thousands. , Said somewhere around the second pour

Mr Barton, who collects this sort of thing, pointed out that his family had once married into the Beethams, as Marie Zélie did, in her turn, when she arrived. A coincidence of names more than anything, the kind a small country hands you. I raised my glass to her all the same.

The food matched the occasion without trying too hard to. Oysters two ways to begin, one bright with citrus, one with caviar and a whisper of mignonette, served on beds of herbed salt.

And because the potter in me can never switch off, I spent an embarrassing amount of the evening turning the plates over in my mind. Everything came on speckled stoneware, the good honest kind, and it made the whole table feel like someone's home rather than a restaurant. The last course was the one I'm still thinking about: a dark chocolate delice with wine-poached fruit, a rubble of crumble and scattered rose petals, on a warm clay plate that I would happily have smuggled out under my coat.

You plant a vine, you're saying you intend to stay.

There was no driving home this time. We'd been sensible for once and taken a little cottage in Martinborough, ten minutes down the road, and rolled straight into it, the good kind of tired, a little in love with a wine and rather more in love with the story behind it. Best of all there was a spa, and we sat out in it under a very black, very starry Wairarapa sky, at which point I began quietly campaigning for one of our own in the back garden later this year.

There's a lesson in the evening, too, for all of us who make things and worry no one will remember them: put a real name on it. Mean it. The rest looks after itself.