John Cleese’s Meaning of Wine
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If I watched more than snippets of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” I always feared, something dire would happen to my brain. Despite being severely unhinged, the Python skits often required a dollop of learning to be properly appreciated. Otherwise, it wouldn’t mean much to watch the “All-England Summarise Proust Competition,” complete with Proustometer. Or a skit in which Greek and German philosophers square off in a soccer match.
A dollop of vinous learning is now offered to us by John Cleese, the tallest ex-Python, in a new Food Network mini-course called “John Cleese’s Wine for the Confused” (airing next Saturday at 5 p.m. and Sunday at 4 p.m.). As Mr. Cleese, looking casual in blue sport shirt and khaki slacks, takes us from tasting rooms to fermentation tanks, from vineyards to a wine-pour at his own kitchen counter, we do learn many wine basics. Three great red and three great white wine grapes are introduced. A wine-shop owner discusses where the bargains lurk. Restaurant wine markups are explained. And we learn how tricky it can be to chase down our own personal favorite bottles without knowing the right descriptors.
Mr. Cleese even convenes a lawn party at his California home where a dozen or so of his friends become guinea pigs. The group is asked, for example, to sip a wine blind and identify it as red or white. As many think it’s one color as the other.
Mr. Cleese is on target in a brief skit in which a diner at a snobby restaurant, trying to order wine suited to his meal and his wallet, is savaged by a nasty sommelier. The skit has that Pythonic feeling of impending mayhem, with Mr. Cleese playing both roles.
In his effort to simplify wine, however, sometimes Mr. Cleese oversimplifies. He intimates, for example, that riesling is somehow preferable – perhaps more “grown-up” – when it is dry rather than sweet. He praises a California winemaker as a pioneer for having crafted, years ago, a dry riesling, but makes no mention of the Alsatian rieslings that have been around all along to rattle our teeth. In any case, a wedge of salty blue cheese and a few slices of ripe pear taste much the better with a sweet riesling.
At his lawn party, Mr. Cleese asks his guests to guess which is the most expensive among an array of wines costing between $5 and $200, identified only by a letter on the glasses. In a case of no wine left behind, the votes are all over the place. Only two tasters identify the top-dollar wine and others choose the $5 wine. “Quality should be judged by your own taste, not some inflated price tag,” Mr. Cleese says. That’s not quite fair. That $200 bottle may indeed be overpriced; on the other hand, it may well have been made for the long haul, while cheap wines are meant for immediate use. Given 20 years of cellar sleep, the $200 bottle may show its stuff – the more so if it’s savored at the dinner table with the right dish and the right friends.
Mr. Cleese’s charm and intensity aside, sometimes this show seems as matter-off act as the training films on naval engineering I watched as a young midshipman, which is too bad. Wine, unlike diesel engines, has a soul. It can even refresh one’s own soul, as Mr. Cleese affirms when he declares that “wine saved my life” during a Monty Python filming stint in wintery Scotland back in the 1970s. “It was wet, cold, dank, and miserable,” he remembers. Each evening, he dined at a restaurant where he was introduced to fine white Burgundy. Compared to other whites he’d experienced, these Burgundies were “richer, more full bodied, with lots of different tastes within them.” It was those wines, Mr. Cleese says, that “persuaded me to go on shooting the movie instead of shooting myself.”