Pray for me. By the time you read this, I will be pedalling painfully up an Umbrian hillside with a strongly- built husband and a horribly fit son. There will be no pauses to wander through vineyards, a family fatwa having been imposed. "You're not going to drag us off into a whole lot of wine stuff on this holiday," they said. But if I survive this mad cycling expedition at all, it will be because the pleasure of discovering good bottles every evening outweighs acute muscular pain.
I've been in training these past few weeks getting the taste-buds back in tune with the unique flavours of Italy. It's a necessary exercise because, if you haven't had them for a while, Italian wines can come as quite a shock to the system. Compared to the big, fruity smoothies of the New World (or some parts of the Old World hell-bent on emulating it), they can seem disconcertingly austere.
"I can't get into Italy at all," a wine drinker who is usually game for anything complained the other day. "The wines are just too astringent." I know what she means. Although Italy has hundreds of wine styles, born of very different grapes, climatic conditions and regional traditions, it is possible, I think, to bundle them all together with one sweeping statement. They tend to be high in acidity - very tangy in the mouth. This may sound like a black mark, but it's often a blessing in disguise. Why? Because they perk up the palate and remain fresh-tasting even when you've drunk more than you should.
There are still quite a few duds on the market, it has to be said, which do Italy's image no favours. I'm thinking of watery whites with no discernible flavour but enough acid to strip the surface off your tongue; thin reds which take the sour cherry notes which are so typically Italian to the bitterest extreme. But Italy's winemakers seem to be moving steadily towards smoother, more harmonious wines, even in the lowest price bracket.
Some producers are broadening their export markets by using a higher proportion of internationally popular grapes like Chardonnay and Cabernet than before. I can't say this approach fills me with glee when the world is drowning in Chardonnay & Co already - and Italy has so many interesting grape varieties of its own. Do we really want anonymous "international" wine from a country with such a talent for being different? I don't think so - no more than we'd want Ferrari to be sucked in to General Motors.
More exciting is the tendency to turn out tastier wines simply by growing better grapes and leaving them to ripen for longer. Although this is a worldwide trend, it's particularly welcome in Italy as it tames that old astringency. This summer I've tasted more thoroughly quaffable Italian white wines and more inviting reds than ever - and that's before I've even got there.
If you think the geography of Italian wine is baffling, I'm with you all the way. Wine merchants complain that consumers still think automatically of Chianti when Italy is mentioned, and consign all the country's other wine regions into a fuzzy mental compartment labelled "The Rest". That's probably because there are just so many of them. Compared to France or Spain, Italy has relatively few areas where vines can't grow.
But, believe me, it's well worth getting rid of the Chianti blinkers - if only to discover how much more this country has to offer. The runaway success of Salice Salentino here over the past few years proves that Irish palates warm to the dark, raisiny richness of wines from the sun-baked south. But remember the freshness factor comes to the fore in the wines of the north - the juicy light reds and bracing whites of the Veneto, for instance. Middle Italy offers huge scope, too, in areas like Abruzzo and the Marche as well as the pockets of Tuscany beyond Chianti. There's also Umbria, whose pretty hills are much better suited to vines, I fear, than bikes.