Oz Clarke - Oz Clarke on Wine: Your Global Wine Companion

And it wasnt just food and drink. As I grew older, it was the smell of linseed oil and my cricket bat; my wellington boots by the back door; the dust in the lane at high summer; the pile of grass cuttings after spring rain had drenched them; my mothers Calche perfume when she was going out; my fathers study and his workshop old books, ink, lathes, lubricating oil and wood shavings. Canterbury Cathedral, cold and pallid on a winter morning, the flagstones smelling of a thousand sunless years, or triumphant and exotic as the incense-swathed clerics swept into the vestry after Eucharist. The crisp, chalky smell of freshly starched sheets and of matron, fresh, crisp and starched. Flavours, scents, emotions, people, places. But no wine.

Quite simply, my parents didnt really drink. This was the 1950s and 60s, and by one reckoning only five percent of Britons drank wine at the beginning of the 1960s. You could just about classify my parents as among them, because about twice a year a bottle of wine did come out at table. The white was Lutomer Riesling from Yugoslavia and I can easily recall its vaguely sweet-sour, fruity fatness from the tiny sips I took. The red was Bulls Blood from Hungary, a furious mighty red in those days; one sip and I puckered up my face with disgust. But then I can also remember the roasted Irish turkey, the sage and onion stuffing, the chipolata sausages, the honey and mustard-glazed ham and the slightly burnt roast potatoes that accompanied it much more fun than the wine. Why did adults drink it?

The only wine I did enjoy if you can call it wine was with the Archbishop of Canterbury. As choristers we would go carol-singing around the cathedral precincts each Christmas, ending up at the Archbishops Palace in the sure and certain knowledge that there would be a mound of mince pies and trays full of fiery, stinging, acrid-sweet ginger wine to encourage our flagging vocal cords. Now, if all wine had tasted like that, I could have got interested.!

Did we have a culture of wine at home? Absolutely not. But did I sense that there wasa culture of wine, as yet distant but thrilling, intriguing, soaked with possibilities? Absolutely.

Ah, but there was something else. My mum had a secret. I discovered it one day rummaging through the larder a proper walk-in job packed full of jars of homemade jam, paper packets of flour and sugar and crystallised fruit and tins of bully beef and Spam, as well as mutton and ham in a meat safe, cheese, cream and butter. Here I go again that smell does it exist any more? The near-claustrophobic odour of a monstrously well-packed larder? But my mums secret. I first saw two bottles at about knee level my mums, not mine behind some Kilner jars. They were bottles of burgundy. French burgundy (in those days, most of the burgundy Britain drank was Spanish, not French). Volnay, its labels illuminated with Gothic script and pictures of monastic cloisters that seemed as exotic and romantic as illustrations from