We’ve arrived in Australia. Indeed last Saturday night we lay, prostrate and exhausted, on the distant shore itself, watching the sun set over the Gulf of St Vincent. Along, it seemed, with most of Adelaide.

The sea was warm; the waves boisterous – perfect for bodysurfing 11-year-olds. John, our 3.5-year-old, quickly found a girlfriend called Cara; they chased each other and lay in the swash for an hour or so, giggling and shouting. He then came back for a sandwich with us, and asked ‘Can that girl come to bed with me tonight?’ This struck us as recklessly fast learning. Joe (the 16-month-old), meanwhile, hurled himself into the waves and was surprised that they fought back with his own insolence but 50 times his strength, and that they tasted of salt. He laughed at the seagulls which hung in the rising wind overhead, threw sand aimlessly but with huge personal interest in the process, and later gnawed an apple core until there was nothing left. (He’s teething.)

The last month has been hair-greying, hence the exhaustion. Moving house is always a struggle; moving countries doubly so, especially to one which guards its right of admission fiercely. For an assortment of reasons, there was too little time to complete the multiple bureaucratic formalities within any sort of temporal comfort zone; Christmas was haunted not by the spectre of Scrooge, but by the alarms and frustrations of the www.immi.gov.au website. Searching for its hidden forms, weighing its double meanings, and trying to outwit its feints, dead-ends and fierce formal prohibitions, constituted the most traumatic computer game I have ever played. The game continues with, I hope, growing respect on both sides.

Meanwhile a ziggurat of arrangements had to be made for our own exit. (What complicated lives we have woven for ourselves … At least ants and bees don’t have phone bills, two sorts of water bill, gas and electricity bills, local taxes, income tax and VAT, cars, pets, internet banking, credit cards and air tickets to worry about.) There were indeed careful plans in place, but almost all of them crumbled in a domino sequence of expensive wreckage which will probably be amusing with hindsight, but which at the time … and combined with a cold snap and enough illness to see three of us on antibiotics and one on oral steroids for New Year’s Eve …

That vineyard across the road ...Anyway, enough of all that. We are now installed in a house which, by a strange twist of fate, lies opposite the remnants of Penfold’s Magill vineyards; I could toss a stone from our front garden onto the tin roof of the Grange cottage. The first of the Adelaide Hills lies just behind. I’ve been watching the vineyards carefully this week, since our arrival has also coincided with the annual heatwave, when what had been a coolish summer so far suddenly ripened into throbbing, fan-oven heat. It was 43.4˚C as I walked across the city streets last Thursday afternoon (Jan 29) -- and 33.9˚C at half-past midnight that same day broke Adelaide’s night temperature record. They are handsome old vines across the road, with deep roots, but even they have been flailing under the solar onslaught, as the dry leaves in the upper canopy show. Since the aircon in our rented house was broken all week, we viewed their suffering with more than usual sympathy.

My new life has one astonishing luxury: an office. No more working in the dark corner of the spare room, while the washing grumpily inches towards dryness on wooden stands; now I can jump on the 140 bus from Auldana, and in fifteen minutes saunter into a shelf-lined room of my own within Adelaide University’s Napier Building on the North Terrace campus. Many thanks to Professor Christopher Findlay and his colleagues in the School of Economics for making a barely numerate stranger so welcome in their midst. More of University life later.

And more winewords later, too, once the organisational frenzy calms a little. The overall aim of the year is to research and write as much as possible of a book on terroir in Australia … or, if you prefer, what makes Australia’s greatest wines and vineyards different from each other and from those found elsewhere on the landmasses of our precious blue planet. With that in mind, if any Australian producer would like to contact me with information, samples or anything else which might deepen my understanding of the above, they are most welcome to do so: the address is 12 Rawson Penfold Drive, Rosslyn Park, SA 5072 and the landline is 08 8364 5296, or via andrewjefford@gmail.com. It’s a great privilege to be here, and to have the chance to learn more about a major world wine culture in situ rather than breezing through in customary journalistic style. I’m anxious not to waste it.