It’s easy to dismiss wine-speak as snobbery. James Thurber expressed this view in a famous cartoon. “It’s a naive, domestic burgundy without any breeding,” a wine-snob tells his companion, “but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.” Yet we still need some descriptive terminology if we’re to move beyond saying that a wine is red/white, dry/sweet and good/bad/revolting. That’s what Oz Clarke, once wine punditry’s answer to Punch and Judy with that adjectival lawn-sprinkler Jilly Goolden on Food and Drink, was trying to get the Top Gear presenter James May to grasp in Oz and James’s Big Wine Adventure (BBC Two).
Clarke had joined the genially blokish May in a 1989 V12 Jag on a month-long tour of French vineyards to get May and us to appreciate the finer points of the grape. As Clarke stuck May’s nose into nettles and cowpats to get a sense of vineyard essences, May stuck to his intention to “have a drink — and I don’t give a pig’s fart about the woody high notes”. No wonder he later likened some pricey vintages to barbecued sausage and Trebor sweets. To be honest, I could relate to that more than Clarke telling us that a good beaujolais should smell “like gym shoes running along tarmac in summer”.
This programme owed a nod to the film Sideways, about midlife malcontents in the sun-dappled vineyards of Santa Barbara. Like the movie, this opening double bill elicited some amusing personality-clash comedy, but as a guide for wine novices it was useless. It was too busy trying to be The Wrath of Grapes or How to Tell Your Whines Apart as it mined the pompous-dad, sulky-teen dynamic between the “wine ponce” and the “beer-drinking petrolhead”. It even wanted us to believe that they were unhappily sharing a tent during the trip.
So you knew when Clarke dressed up to meet a distinguished vineyard owner at her château that May would turn up in his regulation Top Gear jeans. As the wine experts waxed lyrical about cobwebbed-covered 19th-century bottles that would never be opened, May kept lobbing such man-of-the-people questions as “When do we actually get to drink something?” Clarke’s sense of humour was steadily buried deeper than a chalk cellar in Champagne. But then he did seem easy prey for May’s scepticism. After what looked like some desultory grape picking, Clarke described the experience as “so savage, so noble”, as if he were a romantic poet who had just been struck by lightning.
Still, by the end of the second episode, May was appreciating that the good stuff put the five-quid plonk in the shade. It also showed, via a roadside tasting in a market town, that the French knew their wines while treating May’s home-made effort with proper horror.
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I only wish that any practical advice hadn’t been buried in bickering banter. This was more a case of blowing raspberries rather than getting us to smell them. And in giving us two episodes straight away, it was as if the producers realised that they hadn’t quite got the vintage they were after so wanted us to simply gulp it down straight away.
While the pairing of Clarke and May was an attempt to put old wine appreciation in new bottles, The Brain Hospital (BBC One) stuck to what we’ve come to expect from surgery series. This followed neuro-surgeons at the National Hospital in London as they treated a patient with an aneurism, a pensioner with Parkinson’s disease and a woman plagued by crippling cluster headaches. Along with the expectant patients, we got the obligatory gory surgery, tearful bedside visits, melancholy music and the voiceover dripping with urgent concern.
Yet despite giving us three successful cases, the programme didn’t restore surgeons to their god-like status but kept us aware of the risks. Life remains a mortal lottery in which our chances of survival are intricately tied up with that week’s staff roster and the availability of an empty bed.
I never flinched once as a needle prodded brain tissue. But then I had just seen a far more unsettling sight. It was that of Oz Clarke and a mortified James May wearing nothing more than posing pouches as they stepped into a spa bath filled with grape-laced water. This was apparently an attempt by Clarke to get May “much more in touch with the vine”. But it will simply provide ammunition for May’s Top Gear cohorts to rib him when he’s back trying to think up new ways of describing the speed and handling of a car, just as wine writers will strive to find fresh expressions to distinguish 30 Californian chardonnays.