Tomás made even the banal stuff interesting

Ireckon that, if we’re brutally honest with ourselves, there are relatively few people in our lives whom we are always, in whatever circumstances, glad to see. People with whom we are always more than pleased to spend time, people who are true enhancers of life.

Tomás Clancy was, in my life, one of those. A searingly intelligent lawyer by training, a polymath, one of the funniest and most entertaining people I have ever met and, above all, a man of deep kindness and consideration with impeccable, old-fashioned manners.

He was also our finest wine writer. His knowledge of the subject was unsurpassed and his lawyerly instinct for meticulous detail meant that he knew about aspects of regions, properties and producers that most of us had either never noticed or simply forgotten. The word ‘enyclopaedic’ is over-used but not in Tomás’s case.

Encyclopaedic knowledge can be used to bore the pants off an audience, of course, but Tomás could never have done so even if he had tried. He was, in a sense, a born teacher and one of his law students paid him the ultimate tribute saying that he had made property law interesting.

As fellow wine writer Leslie Williams commented, Tomás could be talking about Mozart one minute and the Ramones the next (one of his earlier gigs having been rock music correspondent for In Dublin magazine).

The many tributes paid to him last week would have embarrassed this innately modest man.

But there is one that I think he would have relished.

A listener to his contributions on Newstalk tweeted: ‘He could make even Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc sound interesting.’

Deepest sympathy to his wife, Claire, and sons Tomás (T2 as his dad referred to him), and James.

And so to this week’s wines: reds that will thank you for drinking them on the cool side...

His knowledge for wine was unsurpassed