The perfect wine? One that’s sloshable and gluggable
MEMOIR
Ten thousand varieties of grape have been identified, of which 1,368 are used to make wine. I bet Oz Clarke could identify every single one, as someone who can polish off 200 blind tastings in an average morning — he remains not dead because he spits it out.
Oz has already published two dozen books on wine, so what I admire about his latest juicy volume is that, when push comes to shove, what matters to him is drawing the cork on anything that’s basically ‘sloshable and gluggable’.
Wine, says Oz, ‘is to be drunk with generosity, with subjectivity, with love’. Well, yes, but steady on — there’s nothing worse than a person who gets maudlin after a few glasses. But Oz is in High Romantic mode. ‘Wine’s weakness,’ he says, ‘is that its beauty, its flavours, its personality cannot be preserved.’ Keats, Shelley and Byron said the same about the fading of youth, the vanishing of a girl’s looks — and if there’s one big problem with writing about wine it’s that it’s prone to pretentiousness.
Oz must be aware of this, because his purple patches toy with self-parody: ‘I can smell the exhausted satisfaction of high summer replace the polished green muscles of May.’ Can he really? This sounds like an advertisement for pine-fresh lavatory cleaner, but it’s certainly the case that no perfume, flavour or scent escapes the Oz schnoz. His nose is so sensitive that he owns 12 corkscrews — in case there’s a trace of rust on one of them.
While a student at Oxford, he won the national Wine Tasting Championship. While an actor in the West end — he was General Péron in evita — he used his wages to invest in expensive clarets. Unfortunately, he stored the wine with friends who either drank it or put the bottles in the garden shed, where they shattered in the frost.
I’d have welcomed much more of this lively memoir material. Oz once went on a world tour for the Royal Shakespeare Company with Glenda Jackson and Patrick Stewart. They nearly missed the flight from Heathrow, as the farewell party was arranged by Mel Smith who at dawn was still opening a selection of 1963 ports.
Oz’s experience as an actor led to his popular gig on the BBC programme Food And Drink, which ran for 20 years from 1982.
I remember it vividly: Oz and Jilly Goolden, swirling great goldfish bowls of wine, competing to come out with outlandish descriptions of what was being knocked back: ‘the smell of soft Tarmac in the summer heat’, ‘a wet shaggy-haired dog just in from a drizzly winter walk’, ‘jam tarts burned in the oven’, ‘grease scraped from the inside of a sumo wrestler’s thigh’.
Good heavens! It’s a lot of fuss, when the object is to get plastered. In this new book,
after much talk of fine vintages, Oz thankfully says that the most ‘interestingly real’ wine he has ever consumed was an anonymous carafe of house wine plonked on the table in Italy. It was ‘exactly what I should have been drinking at that moment, in that place’.
Genuineness like that can be hard to come by. A lot of French wine is an EU-subsidised ‘wine lake of gut rot’, filled with herbicides, pesticides and fungicides, fermented in stainless steel tanks instead of oak barrels.
Oz insists the process should remain, as it has for centuries, one of ‘foibles and fancies’, subject to the weather, hail and fire, which can decimate the crop one year, enhance it the next. Rain and fog allow rot and fungus, which affect flavour, paradoxically beneficially.
It is clearly the element of serendipity that Oz enjoys most: each glass is an adventure. There is, however, a cloud hanging over the fun: lobal warming.
By 2050, says Oz, 73 per cent of the Mediterranean, Black Sea, Australia and South Africa will become ‘too hot to continue producing wine grapes’. England will have to become the new Bordeaux — vineyards in Kent are already gathering their harvest a month earlier than a decade ago, and the sugar content of the grapes has doubled.
This big book is too big. Oz occasionally falls over himself in his enthusiasm. ‘This is where it all began, in Ancient Persia,’ he intones. A dozen pages later: ‘Back to where it all began, in Bordeaux.’ Which is it, Oz?
Lastly, he can’t provoke his readers with an utterance like this and leave them dangling: ‘You need to have sex in a vineyard before you can fully understand a wine.’
Let’s have less wine poetry, Oz, and more autobiography.