The misshapen ones end up in the second-class punnets, which then get sent on to the wholesalers.The data logged on to Meile’s computer at the end of the morning’s pick can identify not only the name of the picker and their supervisor, but exactly what time the berry was picked. This information is starting to turn up on the punnet itself – Marks & Spencer insist on labelling theirs with Ms Regan’s name so each fruit can be traced back to the very field that it came from.Years ago the picking was done by local Kentish housewives, but nowadays young seasonal workers come from abroad to do it. Here they’re from Slovakia, Poland, Bulgaria and Lithuania, and many are on government exchange programmes from agricultural colleges. Although the minimum agricultural wage is £3.72 an hour, by paying on volume picked the faster workers can earn two or three times that.David from Poland is in Kent for a second year, and this time round he has managed to land a plum job in the quality-control department. This means he gets to stand in the cold room among a mountain of strawberries, pulling trays out at random to check to see if they’re sweet enough, big enough (25-40mm), red enough and firm enough.Much better, though, is the job the two women in the packhouse have – eating them. Janet Farrow, the packhouse manager, is overseeing a weekly taste test with an auditor from Waitrose. “Nowadays there are so many options it’s become an entirely subjective thing,” says Ms Regan.

“Everyone’s got their own opinion and we often spend hours and hours arguing over which strawberry tastes best.”. Flashing a Ministry of the Interior pass every time the police checked our Georgian Wines & Spirits company van proved eloquently persuasive. I never did find out why our bullet-headed bodyguard also needed to carry a gun on the three-hour trip from the capital, Tbilisi, to the winery, but as we passed a roadblock three kilometres from the Chechen border, I felt we were better off safe than sorry. Mind you, given the parlous state of the roads, with cavernous potholes and farm animals seemingly intent on joining the roadkill statistics, safety is only relative when you’re bumping up and down next to a man with a gun in his pocket. Flashing a Ministry of the Interior pass every time the police checked our Georgian Wines & Spirits company van proved eloquently persuasive. I never did find out why our bullet-headed bodyguard also needed to carry a gun on the three-hour trip from the capital, Tbilisi, to the winery, but as we passed a roadblock three kilometres from the Chechen border, I felt we were better off safe than sorry.

Mind you, given the parlous state of the roads, with cavernous potholes and farm animals seemingly intent on joining the roadkill statistics, safety is only relative when you’re bumping up and down next to a man with a gun in his pocket.
This is Georgia, east of the Black Sea, west of Azerbaijan, south of Russia and north of Turkey. And Georgia, as you may know if you visited Sophia Gilliatt’s display of Georgian artefacts at Vinopolis in London or seen Hugh Johnson on TV, is the cradle of wine. At the Georgian State Museum in Tbilisi, clay pots and jewel-encrusted golden drinking vessels adorned with grape motifs testify to a legacy of wine production extending way back to the sixth century BC. As many as 500 grape varieties formed the basis from which wine was once made in this wild and beautiful country.

It’s a pity then that so much promise was snuffed out so early on, but at least Georgia remains the only chardonnay-free zone in the world.At least, it used to be. Georgian Wines & Spirits (GWS), Georgia’s largest, and in truth, the only company apart from the smaller Telavi with any realistic agenda for modernisation, is planning to introduce chardonnay as one of the new varieties that will help it to compete on overseas markets. Until recently, overseas in Georgian eyes has meant the neighbouring trading countries – in other words, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus. But as production in the post-Soviet era has slowed to a trickle following the mass uprooting of vines (150,000 hectares have been cut back to 60,000 in a decade), it has now turned its eye to the West.Before independence in 1990, Georgia was one of the main suppliers of wine (along with Moldova and Ukraine) to Soviet Russia. Apart from kvanchkara, the distinctive semi-sweet red beloved of Russians in general and Stalin in particular, it was plonk – shedloads of it.I got a taste of the sort of plonk it was at an instructive comparative tasting of wines bought off a local supermarket shelf. After classic examples of cork mould, cabbagy smells and oxidation, best of all was the thoroughly distasteful mousy smell and taste of one company’s wines, apparently derived from fermentation in old Russian metal tanks.

Yuk, pass the spittoon.GWS aims to make wines that will appeal to Western tastes. With oceans of Australian wine, and the rest, washing our way, what’s to recommend a country with no recent track record of decent wines? But everyone has their unique selling point. Georgia’s is saperavi, the widely planted red grape variety once held in great esteem by the Russians Saperavi isn’t Georgia’s only grape variety. There’s a cast list of something like 25 even more unpronounceable grapes still in use (try saying rkatsiteli or tsolikauri).