On my first business trip to Italy about 20 years (, OK I'm old) ago I tried real espresso for the first time. As somebody who only ever liked black coffee and fairly strong-tasting coffee at that, I was in my element! BTW, I can recommend the Calabrian coast (toe of Italy) I had great seafood and wine as well as coffee.

In the mid 1990s we had a holiday in Tuscany and we bought a Gaggia espresso machine. Italian colleagues had always said that the key to a good espresso machine was the pump and that the more Bar the pump could produce the better the espresso. I spoke about 50 words of Italian and the 60-year old proprieter of the appliance shop and his wife spoke no English. However when they spoke of la pompa and he showed fairly decent biceps they were telling me that the Gaggia machine had a good pump! It proved to be excellent value until it gave up the ghost about 7 years later.

Wifey (who hates coffee) decided to buy me a replacement a few years later and it also produced great espresso. It was a Kenwood and like the Gaggia it has a heavy metal coffee drum with a rubber seal to go into the machine. The key with espresso is not just to produce strong black coffee - you can do that with a filter - but to add the tasty foamy crema which distinguishes espresso from strong coffee. Now after years of good service the Kenwood died.

For my birthday wifey bought me a replacement as she knows how I love espresso or other strong coffees with crema. Unfortunately the machine produced no crema and just tasted like a strong black coffee. It was a DeLonghi machine which I think is US-manufactured. Inspection showed that the metal coffee filter was very light and there was no rubber sealing ring; what Gaggia describe as the crema ring.

We returned the machine and got a refund and went to another shop. We found what seemed like a good espresso machine complete with crema ring. This time no water was pumped through the coffee filter drum. Everything was pumped through the cappucino steam outlet even if it was switched off. We went through the manufacturers instructions 3 times with the same defective result. I had not noted the manufacturer but it was again DeLonghi. Second machine returned in one day!

While the above results may be a freak, we are not going to look at DeLonghi again for quite a while. Verdict on the next machine is still open but we will look further afield.