The Road Well-Travelled: Oz Clarke

Oz Clarke began his career as an actor and singer, appearing with the Royal Shakespeare Company and in lead roles in the West End musicals – but over the last two decades has become established as the UK’s best known wine critic. His latest DVD is ‘Oz and Hugh Raise The Bar’ and features Clarke and comic actor Hugh Dennis on a mission to discover the best drinks and pubs in the UK – before taking the best elements and opening their own pub at the end.

Why did you want to do this particular project?
I’m endlessly trying to support all our producers in this country – especially as times get tougher and you actually start realizing that if we don’t all start having a go at this the areas that are precious to us such as pubs, brewers, cider makers – those kind of people are very precious to my heart – will fail to make it through and I’ve always felt from the first time I went near a pub growing up that pubs can be fantastic places in a community or a village or a town. If we actually support them they give a centre to a community that most other places find it difficult to do.

What sparked your initial interest in wine?
It was basically to try and get a girlfriend. I went up to university with almost no money but I had read too much Evelyn Waugh and I thought I wanted to be part of that gilded youth. Of course I got there and found out that to be a member of the gilded youth you needed to have money in your pocket.

I remember going through the university booklet and discovering that there was a university wine society and of course subsidised by the university and for two quid a term you got four tastings. That’s 50 pence a tasting and you could take a guest and I immediately thought this is it – wine is sophisticated so if I can become a wine expert I can swan around in strange clothes talking about wine and its only fifty pence a date! As a date it was a complete disaster, but I began to get really fascinated by wine and I thought all these wines tasted fantastically different and I started realizing very quickly that I was one of those people who could put words to flavours because often people are very good wine tasters but can’t quite get words and flavours sorted out.


You were a successful actor and singer before becoming known as a wine expert. How did you get involved in that?
Looking for a girlfriend again! When the wine tasting didn’t work, I did singing at university and that didn’t really work, either! But then I managed to get into a revue group going to the Edinburgh festival and at last I got a girlfriend! My last term at university I was in Twelfth Night and people from the National Theatre and the RSC came to see it and I got two agents that day! I got home at the end of the day and there was a letter from Northampton repertory theatre asking if I would like to be their juvenile character man for 45 weeks. It was just the most unbelievable chance. I couldn’t believe my luck.

I ended up doing some big stuff in the West End and did the National Theatre, RSC and Sweeney Todd at Drury Lane and General Peron in Evita… I was in Superman and Who Dares Wins, too. I was the first person ever to be arrested by Superman (Christopher Reeve) – I was playing a bank robber. I earned as much in two weeks as I would have earned in 45 weeks in the theatre. Every young actor was desperate to do a little bit of a film like that – it only a few hundred quid a week we are talking about but back then it was just massive.

Do you think the snobbery has gone from the wine business?
I think the snobbery has gone massively from the business and I think you have to thank people like Jilly Goolden and the work that we did on the Food and Drink programme in the 90s. I remember when we started that show we said we could really change things and that there was no reason at all now that the Brits are going off on their holidays to Spain, Portugal, etc and drinking wine for breakfast, lunch and dinner but when they come back to England they immediately go back to that attitude that wine is not for the like of us.

We said we could give people the confidence to realize that wine is just something that makes you happy. We were hated by the traditional wine trade because we were breaking up their cosy little cabal. I think it was about 50 years ago when only 5% of Brits were wine drinkers and they reckon nowadays its more like 85%. So it’s a massive revolution in our eating and drinking habits and I think it’s a very good one.

What do you make of the binge drinking culture?
It’s not new but I find it depressing because it means those of us that enjoy drinking in a social way have to continually fight a defensive action against people who bugger it up for everybody else. But hopefully we will get through this and get back to a slightly more stable kind of drinking pattern. The sad thing is that when alcopops came in Jilly and I fought against them and thought they were the most cynical and nasty piece of profit-grabbing from the drinks companies because it is aimed at kids.

When I was growing up alcohol was a rite of passage and it didn’t taste very nice – your first pint of beer was disgusting. The alcopops drinks mean you can have a 4.5% drink which a kid of two could drink and wouldn’t actually realize they were drinking alcohol. I think its deeply depressing that binge drinking is so aggressively indulged in largely by kids – drugs and drink when you are growing up and your brain has not been fully formed are likely to have an affect upon your future development.

Your father was a doctor and your mother was a nurse but you never had the calling to the medical profession?
I would like to have been a doctor like my dad – fantastic natural healer. But I wasn’t very good at science. I just didn’t show any aptitude in that direction. My dad worked down the coal mines in Kent and he used to take me with him down the mines just to show me another side of life and show me another side of the human condition. He was a chest consultant but he often used to come go out on GPs calls because the miners knew he would go out at three in the morning and they knew the other GPs wouldn’t.

Occasionally I would go off with him to one of the mining villages in Kent and there would be this poor miner weezing away and my dad would keep him alive a bit longer – sometimes just until dawn or the next day so he could have an end with his family around him. He was a great fighter against smoking because he saw all the miners would smoke as well as inhale dust everyday. He finally got numercoleosis/ silecosis accepted as industrial diseases – it was most exhausting effort to persuade the people at the ministry that you don’t get these diseases from just standing about in the pub with a pint in our hand.

How many bottles do you taste a month?
You have to take it quite seriously – some days I can taste 200-250 wines but a more typical day would be 50 or 60 wines. When it’s a big tasting, speed is of the essence because the longer the wine hangs around in your mouth the longer you are going to ingest just a little bit alcohol. So when it’s a big tasting you swirl it briefly and spit it out – the wine only needs to be in your mouth for a second or so to make a pretty good judgment on it. You have to keep reminding yourself this is a serious job and a wine tasting. Some weeks I think I have just had enough of alcohol because its been swirling around your head all week. That’s when you think I must go to the gym tomorrow or stay away from wine for a few days.

"Oz and Hugh Raise the Bar" is now available on DVD from Acorn Media

Photograph: Rex Features