Oz Clark interviewed
Above: Oz Clarke
Above: Oz Clarke and James May
His bloodline is Celtic and home these days is in south London, but Oz Clarke is adamant where his roots lie. “Kent is the heart of where I come from – we moved there when I was three, so if there’s any place in the world that is my place, it is Kent.”
After all, this is a man whose favourite walk is along the White Cliffs of Dover (he and his mother have even headed there halfway through Christmas lunch to make room for second helpings), and although rugby is his real passion now, he is still a fervent Gillingham FC supporter.
As he says: “Football makes you weep these days, except for my dear old north Kent boys in blue, who I still support through thick and thin: mostly thin.”
We are chatting in the ultra-modern lounge of Oz’s London home, which must seem a long way away from the background of his childhood? “I’m a country boy, but this area has a reasonable sense of the village about it,” he points out. “It’s got a common we all use, good pubs, a couple of bars, and a fish shop that gets supplies from Hastings.”
If there is any place in the world that is my place, then it is Kent
But it is Kent that continues to draw him back, and last New Year’s Day, Oz spent the night in Deal with old friends and the next day drove around Westbere, where he and his family used to live, clearly delighted to find it all still remarkably unspoilt.
“The marshes are not in any way farmed – they are owned by the National Trust, so they are actually wilder than when I was a kid,” he says. “My sister and I were allowed to go down there as long as we always had Chunky our dog with us.”
Oz has particularly fond memories of 1 January. When his mother was alive, the two would often stand under the stars at midnight and say to each other: “This is it – the world is turning, the whole world now starts to tumble towards springtime and summer, and we can’t stop it.”
And it was his beloved mother who was indirectly responsible for her son’s career as one of the world’s leading wine experts. Oz explains: “My taste in wine started young. We hardly drank wine at home, but my mother made very good damson wine. Any kind of wine now that smells of damsons gets 100 points out of 100 – that’s all you need to get my approbation, make your wine smell of damsons.
First taste
He continues: “My first taste of it was at the age of three – my brother was drowning and my father was trying to rescue him, my mother was having hysterics, there was an open bottle of wine down by the river, so I drank it. My brother survived, but I very nearly didn’t. It put me off wine for years.”
Part of his early ‘education’ came at the hands of his Welsh father, who was the chest physician for Kent and spent a lot of time with the miners, “trying to keep the poor sods alive,” says Oz. “He used to take me down the mines every year to make me keep working at school – and I have been fascinated ever since.”
The lesson must have worked, because the young Oz moved from a convent education at St Anne’s in Westbere (despite being all-girls, it was the only school in the area his Catholic mother approved of) to Canterbury Choir School when he was eight, where he became head chorister, and then to Kings Canterbury.
It was at Kings that Oz, who was christened Owen, acquired his nickname. “When we played cricket at school, the other schools used to think us choirboys made good hospital cases and used to just fall short of aiming directly at our heads. Meanwhile our headmaster would be on the sides intoning, ‘don’t descend to the level of the guttersnipes’”, laughs Oz.
“Once I went in to bat and the score was three runs for four wickets and most of the rest of the team were on their way to hospital to get their noses fixed. I went in and got 24 runs to the boundary straight away.
Good English sparkling wine is as good as good Champagne, no question
“My dad was keen on cricket, he was a member of the MCC and I’d seen the Australians paste the English bowlers at Lords, so I started playing like them. I got 32 runs in eight balls and by the time I was out, we were 37 for five. I virtually got detention but the boys all loved it and started calling me Oz, because I played like an Australian. It stuck for ever.”
The cricketing choirboy went on to study Theology and Psychology at Oxford – “a fantastically un-useful degree” – where he “read a lot of Evelyn Waugh and decided I wanted that gilded youth lifestyle, on an allowance of £4 a week.”
Oz quickly realised joining the university wine club could be a great way to meet girls. “For £2 you got four tastings a term, and you could also take a guest, which worked out at 50p for four dates a term. Money was short, so this was great, until I realised how little girls found wine tasting interesting,” he explains, ruefully. “None of the girls I took ever gave me a second date.”
Getting into acting, which became the career Oz pursued with considerable success immediately after university, was almost as equally calculated: “I realised the nicest girlfriends were those to be had in the drama club, and I wanted one of them,” he says, deadpan.
And, of course, wine and a sense of theatre have worked beautifully for Oz, who says it would be impossible to do his tastings in front of live audiences and on TV shows without the ability to act.
Good companions
Our conversation swiftly turns to James May, the beer-drinking Top Gear presenter who has been appearing with Oz in their BBC Two series Oz and James’s Big Wine Adventure. “He’s a fascinating fellow and excellent to travel around with, because you never really know what you are going to get,” says Oz. “He is like a delightful, overgrown child who loves to be clever, make smart-arsed remarks and gets bored easily.
“We irritate, amuse and annoy each other with our silly foibles but we get on well – although at the start, he was determined to be as rude and as obscufatory as possible and I was determined to bash some sort of appreciation for wine into him.
“After the first two or three episodes of the first series, we realised we weren’t getting anywhere and needed to calm down and be a bit friendlier.”
The duo must have sorted out their differences, because they are planning another tour next year – but can’t decide where to go. Oz is not entirely happy about the timing, however. “Basically, it takes up any time in the summer I might have had for a holiday, and it’s the one I pine for above all else, because it’s the summer of my childhood – I keep on dreaming about beaches and clifftops, get me to Minnis Bay, get me to Kingsdown, I’m not asking to go very far, I just want a beach,” he cries, in mock anguish.
“The trouble is, what I work in is other people’s pleasure, so I am working in other people’s pleasure time,” and that includes the series he stars in with Anthony Worrall Thompson, Christmas Cooks on ITV.
Designs on food
So is he a bit of a gourmet in the kitchen, too? “I am extremely interested in food; I keep trying to cook all sorts of things – I usually blame my oven when they don’t always work,” he admits.
“My ‘bible’ is The ABC of AWT and Jocelyn Dimbleby’s Sainsbury’s Companion, or, if I’m feeling really exotic, I’ll use Elizabeth David. It’s emotional and gives you a whole sense of Britain and France before and just after the war.
“When I did Desert Island Discs, I picked Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking – she’s such a brilliant writer, she makes everything steam off the page. I have a precious signed copy, and underneath her signature I’ve written ‘she’s just ordered a second bottle of 1978 Mersault.’”
While he may not yet rival his cookery heroes in the kitchen, Oz remains dominant in the wine world. Possessing a photographic memory for wine labels, and an acute memory for tastes and aromas – which he dismisses as “a lucky break” – it is an all-consuming passion.
He has won all the major wine writing awards both in the UK and the US, including the Glenfiddich (three times) Wine Guild (three times) and the Lanson (five times), was named International Wine and Spirit Competition International Drinks Communicator of the Year in 2006, and has written countless best-selling wine books.
Our talk swiftly turns to English wines, and to Kent in particular. “The North and South Downs of Kent are all part of a great big chalk and limestone basin, of which Paris is the centre,” he explains. “If you stand on the White Cliffs of Dover and look across to the White Cliffs of Calais, they are virtually the same, you can almost see where the jigsaw piece joining them would have been when they were one.
Wine future
“If you follow the mounds of chalk you come to Reims and Epany – it’s cretatious chalk, exactly the same as we have in Kent and Sussex. If you follow the North and South Downs along, it’s all facing south west – someone sooner or later has got to say, we’re going to plant some vines there. If not, I’ll have to do it!
“We have Chablis, Sancerre and Champagne conditions in southern Britain – we just didn’t have a wine tradition in the way France did, but now we are beginning to.”
Oz tells me there are “rumours” that some of the big Champagne houses have spent £1.3m on farmland in Kent and Sussex, and that to buy good vineyard land in the two counties costs just one per cent of what it would to buy a Chardonnay vineyard in Champagne: “so the potential is massive.”
He adds: “When you taste Chapel Down Special Reserve, or Balfour from Cranbrook, the potential is there – and the nice thing is these people sell out every year. The slur on English wine has been beaten by our sparkling wine – they win all these blind tastings.
I would also have loved to play cricket for Kent
“Good English sparkling wine is as good as good Champagne, no question – not as good as bad Champagne, and the best is a supremely brilliant achievement.”
As a child, Oz remembers the hops his mother grew in their garden and finds it distressing that along the ‘Champagne Mile’ at Ospringe, “there’s not a single hop bine to be seen.” He is also irritated that the big brewers don’t use the aromatic hops like the Great Kent Goldings, the Whitbread Golding and the Fuggle in their beers, pointing out: “The cost of hops in a pint of beer is 0.17 pence per pint, so to improve the quality would cost you nothing. I still remember the smell of hops in the oast houses – when you are picking them it is the most unutterably heady and exotic aroma. I want a beer that smells of this, please!”
Our time is nearly up and this phenomenally energetic man has places to go, people to see. Just time for two more questions. I ask Oz if his career hadn’t led him into the world of wine, what would he have liked to do? “I do look at what David Attenborough does and think that I would have loved to have been involved in the fantastic world of science and wildlife on TV,” he muses. “I would also have loved to play cricket for Kent – I was never quite good enough to go up to the senior team.”
And with New Year just around the corner, what would Oz’s recommended tipple be to see in 2008? That’s easy: “I would say Chapel Down’s top cuvée, the Special Cuvée – it’s their pink one – 15 per cent Pinot Noir gives it a lovely pink blush.
“Cheer the New Year in with Kentish wine and the future of the Kentish wine industry – and may Gillingham get promoted next year!”