Jarno Trulli - Vintage Racer

But Jarno's wine venture is of a different stripe. When, in 2000, he bought the 32-hectare Podere Castorani estate on foothills overlooking Pescara and the Adriatic, he wasn't signing on with the image-conscious. He was renewing roots.

"My grandfather was a wine producer," he says.

So, for the past several millennia, were a great many men of this Abruzzo region, where Trulli was born 31 years ago. Wine has been the life-blood of the place, a key constituent of its identity. In buying a vineyard, Trulli was lining himself up with the land and its past.

"I need that link," he says - not least because the racing life regularly takes him about as far from Abruzzo as it's possible to get.

The montepulciano has, incidentally, nothing to do with the Tuscan town of the same name. But, handled properly, the grape can provide, in the words of British wine writer Hugh Johnson, "one of Italy's tastiest reds, full of flavour and warmth."

Quite, and it was at this top end of the spectrum that Jarno determined to play. Which is understandable. A chap aspiring to be an F1 world champion cannot reasonably stick his name on plastic bottles full of throat-rot.

"I'm a perfectionist. I wanted a quality wine," he says.

So he got three friends on board, plus his dad (also called Enzo) as overall administrator, and bought the Podere Castorani domain in the commune of Alanno. Reached up a swirling hill road that dissipates into a dirt track, it's a spectacular spot, lording it over a landscape where man and nature clearly made their peace some little time ago. In the foreground, anyway. There are those bears in the arresting peaks behind, although that only serves to enhance the picture with a sort of tense grandeur.