Unpublished Oz Clarke Interview

[Gregory Torso]

In 2019, long before the pandemic was even a dream of a bat's sneeze inside a racist spray-tan enthusiast's weave, I was sent by my uncle to interview Oz Clarke for his wine circular. The interview was never published, for reasons that will become clear through reading, but I recovered it recently from a faltering hard-drive and present it to you now, as a tribute to the popular man of wine, who is still alive, by the way, at time of writing.

In Vino Verit-Oz!

It has been almost two decades since Oz Clarke, the "popular man of wine" (© ozclarke.com), last graced our screens with his whimsical oenophile views but even the most tongue-blind of grape ignoramuses can surely picture his lightly-boiled, jovial pink face, and recall his vivid descriptors as they tumbled out of his mouth. He may have retired from the public spotlight, but he has certainly not been slacking off when it comes to matters of the vine. I went to his Biblical granite spire in the hazy fields of Vauxhall to chat to him about wine.

Oz answers the door in a convivial mood, dressed in what I later ascertain to be a light blue child's school shirt from Nutmeg At Morrisson's and brutalist gabardine slacks with razor sharp pleats.

"Glass of wine?" he offers as his opening gambit, eschewing any other form of greeting.

I have done my research well and know not to answer in the affirmative, as Oz is a very belligerent and uncooperative drunk, and any excuse to begin pouring "big boy Vimto" down his excellent neck will be pounced upon.

I demur, noting a flicker of disapproval in his eyes, but that is gone in a flash, replaced by his natural, congenial grin and piercing aftershave.

He takes me through into the sun parlour and leaves me for a moment to take stock of my surroundings: accolades galore adorn the mantel – from his time dividing the reds from the whites in his own private apartheid on the BBC's Food & Drink programme, all the way to his successful Oz Clarke Tips It Down Your Front series for teenagers just starting out in the sommelier business. Amongst the awards are trinkets from faraway lands where Oz has popped up, glistening, pink and hairless, as he trawled the vineyards and wine bars for that elusive perfect glass of kerplunk.

Oz joins me, a breakfast Tokaji clasped in hand, already halfway through an anecdote about finding a severed human ankle in the flowerbeds behind BBC Broadcasting House where he had gone to throw up a power hour's worth of frothy lager on the orders of Jilly Goolden ("she used to bring in the foulest, cheapest Polish beer, and we had to chug between takes"), but before he can reveal what happened with the grisly discovery, already his mind has wandered away.

He lowers his withered hind quarters into a budgerigar-green Chesterfield armchair and fixes me with an unwavering stare. The interview has begun.





"They used to call me 'Biff Tannin' back in Slosh Academy", the avuncular booze gnome grumbles. "I could sniff out a thick-skinned berry in a barrel of bastards..."

Sensing a tumultuous exchange ahead, I broach the topic of the new breed of wine-tasters, and ask him how he feels to have passed on the torch to a younger generation of viticulturists.

"Oh, it's fabulous. Just wonderful", he softens, and I feel like a captain who has just steered his ship away from a looming, mid-morning drunk whirlpool.

"Wine is often seen as the province of utter, utter ponces, and it just feels nice that young people are willing to overlook all that rot and get their cocaine-stiff noses out of their mucky iBooks and what have you, and into a nice glass of... Chardonnay?"

Prudently, I accept his offer of a Chardonnay ("taste the glycerine, man-cub"), as he leads me on a tour of his spiral abode.

"You might say I was 'born' into wine", he remarks, framing his statement as though it were a joke, and I wait for a punchline, but nothing comes except for a small belch as soft as a spider's silky poo.
"Apparently, I was a very unruly baby..."

Sensing a further derailment of the interview, I ask Oz if I might see his study, where his many legendary wine guides are penned.

"Oh, I'd be de-light-ed", he replies, and again pauses, looking intently at me with a mischievous glint in his eyes, as if he has made some kind of wordplay, but he hasn't. He has not. I wonder if Oz Clarke doesn't actually understand puns. This view is compounded upon entry to his study, where I immediately notice the full-wall map of Australia.

Very good, I grin, gesturing to it.

"I'm sorry?" the diminutive vintner responds.

Australia.

"A wonderful country. Dynamite Shiraz."

Yes, but... Australia... Oz.

"Yes? What?"

Changing tack, I gesture to a row of books along the shelves, where I spy a collection of books by L Frank Baum. I point them out, with a polite chuckle.

"A very good writer", is the humourless response.

Yes but it's a little on the nose, isn't it? The Wizard of...

Oz Clarke's face begins to darken, and I swiftly abandon this course of enquiry.

As he waxes enthusiastically about Pascaline Lepeltier's Filthy Horny Wine Adventures, I find myself regarding this man with wonder. He seems fragile, egglike, but with a grumpy flame of pugilistic heat within, and as we stand at the top of the corkscrew staircase slagging off the late Russell Harty, I genuinely fear that he may suddenly lash out and send me tumbling down the steps if I don't nod at the right cues in his diatribe.

Up close, he resembles a peeled grape, with tiny poached egg eyes. Constellations of exploded capillaries flourish across his face, and bloodshot forks of agony bulge in his eyeballs as he recounts his numerous scuffles with Harty in the car-park bays of the BBC, both of them basket-arsed on crikey juice.

"He wanted me out", Oz continues. "He didn't agree with my beliefs."

About gastronomical matters?

"No. The nudity."

We have reached the foot of the stairs, thankfully, and I feel sufficiently buoyed to press him.

"I love being nude. To cast off every stitch of material. Once a month I ascend a boulder in my garden and remain there, gymnosophical and naked, like a tree frog, squatting at the summit all afternoon. I helps me to think of new, exciting ways to talk about wine."

"Russell despised it. He was very much against nudity. Sometimes on set, he wore two suits, one on top of the other. Pouring with sweat under the hot studio lights, he could barely do his jacket up. I'd be off-camera, discretely removing my bath robe, ready to present my section of wine tasting in puris naturalibus, and I would see the anger flash into his eyes. We would have to stop filming for several hours whilst he calmed himself down."

But surely your piece, as it were, would have been unbroadcastable?

"I was filmed from the neck up! You would only see my face as it consumed and considered each glass of wine before speaking its proclamation on the aroma, the body, the fucking legs on it!"

As Oz proceeds to brutally decant a Riesling Kabinett, I turn matters swiftly to the cellar, asking for a brief tour and perhaps some mid-price recommendations for any budding epicures in our readership. Upending the Kabinett into a couple of pint glasses, he agrees.

"This is just the pleb's level, of course", he says in his whimsical screech. "The really nice, lovely bottles are under the ground, far beneath us, appreciating and fermenting, growing dark and rich amongst the roots of the world."

Ignoring this pseudo-poetic, flowery nonsense (and the 'pleb' remark) I ask Oz for a few entry-level endorsements.

He swigs from his pint glass, appraising the wine racks.

"Pinot Grigio: puddle water, frankly. Leave this out if the plumber's coming round and you can't be fucked putting the kettle on. Sauvignon Blank, the oven chips of wine. Stick it with everything, no problem. Beaujolais, wouldn't wash my hair with this, if I had any. Cabernet Sauvignon from Sainsbury's, that's basically ketchup, mate. Where's that sexy little Zinfandel, she's always up for it."

Later, standing on the verandah, I tell Oz that it would be "corking" to see him back on the TV. He doesn't understand what I mean, but a scuffle is averted as I ask him what he thinks the future holds for him.

"I plan to write more books on how good wine is", he says wistfully. "After that, I shall retire. Seeing out my days in this tower. Drinking the good stuff."

Finally, what's it all about, Oz? My last question to the unadorned bird of paradise, the bald robin, the hopping pantomime parakeet of the grapevines.

"The sensory examination of a decent trough of pulverised grape mush", he answers wearily. "I am being flippant, of course. But I would urge your readers to just get stuck in. Get it down you. Pour it in your face. In vino verit-Oz."

Surprising us both with an actual joke, we genuinely chuckle for the first time that day, and for an instance I glimpse the man, the core Oz, buried deep within the years of bitterness and cynical dismissal of all life outside the bottle, and it makes me sad.

À votre santé, le clerk australien!





Oz talks supermarket wines.

During a lull in our interview, I broached the subject of a blind taste test of various budget supermarket wines, in the hope that Oz might offer up his world famous critiques on the kind of low quality farmyard slash that you cretins think is drinkable. To my relief, he agreed.

Here are his proclamations:

1. Chilean Marmot, 10.5%, £2.49

"Well, this is boisterous. A clash of tin and leaf. I feel like I'm getting a tattoo on the back of my tongue. Ah. Hmmm. No. God, no. No."

2. Sangre Mierda Superior, 11%, £2.99

"Fig rolls, tallow, something fatty and dripping. Yes, see the grease on the top. A very fat wine, but with a miserable afterglow. If you could bottle the howl of a depressed wolf, it would pour like this."

3. Blood In The Bowl, 19%, £3.99

"The cologne of a moping, rancid vat hag trudging round a museum gift shop."

4. Fairplay Mountain Shazbot, 13.5%, £4.49

"Now this wine is rhythmic, it's done the legwork. This is a wine that's on its fifth marriage. A clarion of piped-in dog-turd motivational anthems for the already dead in hospital. A carousel of iodine and soap. A tiny cyclone on an alligator's jawbone. A pigeon that you get to hold for one minute before it flies away and its soft body is gone forever and you will never feel such a connection to anything else in this world again. You are dead. You died. This wine has gone up its own arse. Infinitely."