"It is a question, like all artistic endeavour, of which end you begin from," he said. "Do you begin by trying to please the market? Or do you begin by trying to create wine which is the most perfect possible expression of the conditions under which it was grown?" This is the difference, between, say, the writer who writes from his own experience and soul, and the writer who constructs a thriller from the kinds of characters and twists of plot which generally sell thrillers.Drouhin asks the waiter to uncork his anonymous bottle It is, he says, a bottle of 15th-century wine, made in 1980. He is an initially shy, though ultimately eloquent man, with a rather upper-class British air and a rather British sense of humour I eye the bottle in question suspiciously. It is dusty and has no label.Mr Drouhin sums up all the contending arguments about terroir as persuasively as anyone Terroir is mostly applicable to quality wines, he says.

Did Yengeni remember, he asked, how quickly he had betrayed his comrades after a session with the bag?NOW THE VOICES of the previously voiceless have been heard. At Yengeni's insistence Benzien was forced to demonstrate on another former victim. While stunned Commissioners watched the victim lay face down, hands locked behind his back, the fleshy, florid-faced Benzien sat astride him and placed a bag over his head. In the old days the bag would have been wet and held tight until the victim was on the point of suffocation."What kind of human being does that to another?" Yengeni pressed Benzien. The torturer, who said he was in therapy, said he had asked himself that question many times before.But the relationship between the tortured and the torturer survived Benzien inserted the knife one last time and twisted. Special hearings have laid bare the complicity in apartheid of the media, business, churches and other institutions. Alan Frampton grows 10 million of them a year under cover at his farm in Chichester, West Sussex, using computer technology to regulate the temperature, humidity and hours of daylight Young plants are sent to the Canary Islands to develop.

One of the most disturbing moments in the Commission's life came when Captain Jeffrey Benzien, once the Western Cape's most feared police torturer, was asked by a former victim, ANC MP Tony Yengeni, to demonstrate the torture method for which he was infamous. "To burn a body to ashes takes about seven hours," he told a TRC hearing which later awarded him amnesty. "It has to be turned frequently so all parts of the body burn away. It [the burning body] smells like a braai."Although there were separate hearings for victims and perpetrators, inevitably their voices came together; flip sides of the same story. "There are a lot of weddings this weekend and white was in demand, so the price rose," says Mr Edwards. Each trader takes a walk around the glass-walled gallery above the market to see what else is available and how good it looks before setting a price. Only the most regular, favoured customers will be allowed to haggle.The most expensive flowers available here are Casablanca lilies - which are very fashionable - at pounds 2 a stem.

"This morning the growers wanted me to take them for pounds 31 a bunch - which is 10 stems - so I told them to send them where the sun don't shine."Once you have become accustomed to the dazzling colours, the thousand shades of green and the intoxicating smell of the market, the most remarkable thing is how old-fashioned it all is. The trader's job is all about trust, reliability and the gift of the gab, just as it always was. It is the end of his week, but the stock available is still worth up to pounds 15,000. "The flowers we get now are better quality than they were 10 years ago, they're grown better, they're treated and they last longer."MOST OF his stock comes from other parts of Europe, Africa and South America. When the boxes arrive he has two or three days to sell them on at their best; before the market moved to its purpose-built, air-conditioned premises, they had to be sold the same day.High on a shelf are boxes of gerbera in bright colours Yesterday they were selling for 40p a stem, today it is 25p. The systems have evolved in response to the supermarket demand for more reliable quality, he says. "The layman is fed up with flowers that die when you get them home, so by improving the logistics of producing and selling flowers we are able to guarantee the product."Florists, on the other hand, are diversifying.

"The amount people are spending is going up and they want different things, more unusual and better quality flowers," says Dennis Edwards, who has traded at New Covent Garden, the country's largest flower market, for 10 years. As well as florists and designers, he supplies restaurants such as Mezzo and Quaglino's. "There's nothing worse that getting an old-fashioned bunch of carnations, is there? But the big change over recent times is that men are now being sent them. The other day I saw someone I know who works in television production, a very butch fellow, carrying two bunches that had been delivered to him, and he was very pleased with them."The only flower that Britain exports seriously is the chrysanthemum. Mark Robinson, marketing director of JWT, the biggest advertising agency in the country, says his company's reception area is constantly filled with bunches waiting to be picked up by couriers. There are also arrangements in the meeting rooms and the office of each director. And I suppose we now live in a gesture society - and somehow a bunch of flowers is a far bigger gesture than anything else that costs the same."For that reason the flowers sent between businesses tend to be bright, dramatic, spiky, colourful and elaborately presented.