He was an anaesthetist, I think the woman with him was a surgeon. There were five other people, including us, on the table and one of those people, a bloke we'd known for fewer than three hours, bought lunch for everyone on the table in an outstandingly generous gesture.
We'd met the bill payer and his two pals in a car park in Novelda as we waited to do a tour of the vineyards that produce eating grapes, uvas de mesa, in this little bit of Alicante province.
The wind was blowing, it looked like rain. Of the 23 people signed up for the tour only five of us actually turned up. Our future benefactor and his two pals went in one car and we went in the vineyard owner's BMW along with the tour organiser.
Spaniards seem to prefer their green grapes with seeds. One particularly famous seeded variety is aledo; the grape traditionally eaten alongside the midnight chimes that ring in the New Year. All the eating grapes we saw were protected from birds, beasties and the elements by wrapping them in what look like paper bags as they grow on the vine. This time of year, the run up to Christmas and the New Year, is a big time for picking - possibly because of the popping them into your mouth as the chimes ring out thing - but that could be a bit of chicken and egg type reasoning. One of the various stories to explain the twelve grapes tradition of the Spanish New Year has the grape growers of the past, faced with a huge glut of grapes at Christmastime, coming up with the cunning plan of promoting their fruit for the New Year. Do Britons choose to eat sprouts as a Christmas accompaniment or is it simply that there was very little option in the dead of a British winter?
So we got the tour. I understood it perfectly. We saw the forms of "trellises", we heard why hand picking was the only way, we learned about the seedless varieties, with pink skins and red leaves grown under nets for the British market and lots lots more. But that was a week ago. All the fine detail has now drained from my overtaxed and withered mind.
The bit that I do remember, and the thing that surprised me most, was the next bit. The vineyard owner drove us to a shed just off the La Romana-Novelda road, by the turn down to Aspe. It's hardly a centre of population. Inside the shed there were well over 100 people working at a cracking pace to prepare the fruit for market. They cut off leaves, discarded damaged grapes, packed the fruit in variously named boxes for different supermarket chains and then carted the boxes to waiting lorry trailers or piled them into the cold store. It was a very slick operation carried out to a stridently upbeat and very Spanish musical soundtrack.
And to finish off we went to a bodega that grew the other sort of grapes, the ones that people ferment into alcohol. That's where we met the man who paid for our lunch and the medic who thought that after fifteen years in Spain it was surprising that I'd heard a Spanish song.
