There's been much coverage of wine and philosophy of late. Wine and fraud is a hot topic, and getting hotter. Wine and religion has a lot of mileage, as does wine and health. What, though, about wine and spiders?

I owe these eye-boggling pictures to Robin Tedder of the excellent Glenguin Estate in the Hunter Valley. It's an orb-weaver spider - though I should point out the ambiguity of that remark. Orb-weavers include over 10,000 species. Robin tells me that this is one of the Golden Orb Weavers (genus Nephila) - 'golden' refers to the silk of the web itself, rather than the white-bodied spider. It's probably a female, and it probably ate its own mate. This spider (legs included) is about as big as my head.

Some orb-weavers devour their own webs every night and spin a new one every day, but the detritus in this web suggests that it doesn't do that. I'm not sure what its food supply might be - but there's obviously lots of it. It's not particularly toxic; less so that the much smaller (and all-too-common) redback, for example. You wouldn't, though, want to be running naked between the rows without a torch at night …

It does no harm at all to the vines themselves - unlike spider mites (another 1,600 species). They, though, are less than 1mm in size. They are members of the Tetranychidae family, but also part of the Arachnida class. The live on the underside of leaves, where they sometimes spin protective little webs; the damage is caused when they puncture the plant cells to feed. In hot, dry conditions, they can hatch in three days and become sexually active in another five; a single mature female could have a million offspring in a month. You're much better off with a Golden Orb-Weaver or two.