You don’t need me to tell you what an exciting time it is for fresh produce. You have probably just read Gordon Ramsay singing the praises of baby leeks and ickle carrots, but those of us without hotlines to the country’s best suppliers are in for five long months of disappointment at the hands of the supermarkets.

They generally do pretty well over the winter. Apples, satsumas, pineapples… but come summer, it’s downhill all the way. Be honest, when was the last time you had a really nice strawberry from Tesco?

The trouble is, the supermarkets tend to do their sourcing according to what lasts well, not what has the best flavour. Hence, the ubiquitous Elsanta strawberry, which successfully tastes of nothing throughout its three-week extended shelf life, or the “home-ripening” peach, which, denied the time to mature naturally on the tree, may as well be called the “home-shrivelling-and-still-hard-as-a-bullet” peach.

I’ve always found tomatoes similarly disappointing. I was still in short trousers when they stopped tasting as good as they did when I was young. But clearly memory can play weird tricks, because, according to Paulo Battistel, pictured above, British supermarkets sell the pick of the European crop.

Battistel’s opinions are not to be taken lightly. The Italian agronomist, who could be described as the “éminence rouge” of the tomato world, advises the UN on tomato cultivation and works with seed companies to produce new varieties at the rate of up to 200 a year. He can differentiate between the 5,000 varieties of tomato in the same way a sommelier does wine, and could tell his Piccolos from his Shirens and Arancas (all just plain cherry tomatoes to you and me) with his eyes closed.

He was in England recently to help Pizza Express to develop its new Viva Tomato spring menu, and explained that while tomato varieties used to have a market life of 15 to 20 years, now they were doing well to stay around for 5 years. “People are always looking for the next thing,” he says. “They want new tastes, new shapes. The beef tomato used to be 70 per cent of the British market until five years ago. Now it’s 40, with another 20 varieties filling the gap.”

He expertly identifies a pile of tomatoes in front of him – small round Titis, plum-shaped baby San Marzanos, beautiful ribbed Marindas, and tiger-striped Tigrellas. “These,” he says, picking up the Tigrella and Marinda, “are two of my favourites. They grow in southern Sicily and are irrigated with salty water, which would kill other varieties but gives them a great balance of sugar and acid, and a mineral taste. You’ll probably find them too acid, though.”

Every country has its preferences. In Italy acidity is more important than ripeness. “We match every tomato to every dish,” Battistel says. “So the baby San Marzano is perfect for pizza as it has an intense aroma and is instantly identifiable. For pasta, the best is a midi plum, which melt into the other ingredients to produce a dense sauce. In Spain, they prefer round beef tomatoes, which to us Italians are too watery. In Russia, they like big cherry tomatoes.”

And in Britain, we just like them tasteless, then? He smiles. “You like a ripe, sweet flavour, and you are prepared to pay more for quality than any other country.” That is why the best growers see Britain as their prime market, and despite what you might hear about the stranglehold power of our supermarket buyers, they pay the growers a bigger cut (about a third of the final price, compared with a quarter elsewhere).

“When growers get a tasty new variety, they always like to trial it in England,” Battistel says. “When it is not so good, they give it to the Germans.”

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