There are only two British television wine presenters taxi drivers have heard of, Jilly Goolden and Oz Clarke. Who can forget their double act on Food & Drink in the 1980s and ’90s? Since then innumerable cooks have become household names but there have never been any other wine celebrities who pass the cabbie test.
As a child I assumed that Oz was Johnny to Jilly’s Fanny Cradock, looking on in awe as she came up with outlandish wine descriptions. He says in his new book, Red & White: ‘people used to think we were married’. But later I discovered that Oz is a wine expert of startling erudition and eloquence. I’ve tasted with him a few times and his knowledge and recall are astonishing. He’s written a lot of books, some excellent like New Classic Wines, but others that didn’t have the full Clarke spark. Happily Red & White is very much a return to form.
It functions as both a memoir and a guide to Oz’s world of wine and, my God, he really can write. There are passages recalling his Kentish upbringing that reminded me of Orwell’s Coming up for Air. It quickly moves on to his time at Oxford and how he took over the wine society from the toffs in a Momentum-style coup. Rather than just open old bottles of claret, Oz and co. taught themselves to taste by memorising flavours. ‘We must personalise smells. Not just any old blackcurrant jam — it had to be the one that you remembered,’ as he puts it. Oz’s Oxford team beat Cambridge at wine tasting for the first time in years. Oz then took on the might of the French and beat them. Le Figaro was edged in black for only the second time in its history.
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