For those who may be otherwise engaged this Sunday June 24th at 12:30 (roasting hogs, for example, or cycling the route of the Grand Depart of the Tour de France which whistles off through southern England on July 8th this year, going past the end of the road where I live along the way), the Food Programme on China tea which I have made with Ed Eisler of Jing Teas will be available on the BBC website for a week afterwards, so you can always listen again later. British listeners will know that the Sunday version, at 24 minutes, is shorter than the Monday 16:02 repeat, where you get the pleasure of an extra four minutes. It is, though, the shorter Sunday version which stays on the web and which eventually gets archived.

Agony and ecstasy? What I’m referring to in this instance is the editing process, whereby nearly 5 hours of raw material is sliced back to just 24 minutes — or indeed less, since the final cuts have to be linked with a studio script. This has been done with smiling ruthlessness by my long-suffering producer, Rebecca Moore, but inevitably some of my favourite moments of the trip have had to disappear into the black hole of oblivion. Most of the programme dwells on the historic Bohea and the cult Pu Erh, and our Green Tea strands have been reduced to a mere thread or two, alas — so no crunching up and down the rows of Mr Song’s tea garden in Jiande (though that is where the photo on the BBC website was taken), and no wandering around the mists of Anxi where Iron Buddha of Compassion begins its journey to human nourishment.

The final editing stages are particularly painful. Seconds count. I described the stew of mountain frog we ate for dinner up in the hills of the Bohea Farm; a snippet of that description remains, but the fact that its skin (still attached to the cooked frog) was a pretty mottled black and white colour has gone forever. So, too, has my probably over-excited exclamation when I discovered a primrose moth, four inches across, lying in my path next to the tea-smoking kiln. The pains of art! Rebecca has made a lovely programme, though, so I hope some of you get the chance to catch it. She has even salvaged some of the resonant audio from Lingying Buddhist temple, right at the beginning of the programme …

By the way, Webmaster Mick will be posting more of the photographs from my trip on this blog very soon.

On Monday, I fly to Santorini — the first stage in a long-held ambition to visit the vineyards where one of Europe’s greatest vins de terroir begins life: the unique white Assyrtico, grown in wind-sheltering scrapes on the volcanic soils of Europe’s Krakatoa. When my Waitrose Food Illustrated colleagues and I organised a ‘Greece versus Rest of the World’ blind tasting competition at London’s Vintners Hall a few years ago, the 100+ readers attending the event voted their preference (not knowing which wine was which) for an Assyrtico from Santorini over a Chablis from the exemplary William Fevre. Watch this space!