The Wine Show: two out for a tipple

Two well-known actors take us on a journey around Europe, drinking wine and learning about it.

The Wine Show’s Matthew Rhys, left, and Matthew Goode.

In a country so keen on wine o’clock, you might think there would be some decent programs about it on television. There is, after all, no shortage of shows about food, and Jamie Oliver has done more to democratise cooking than any other TV chef.

But wine? Not so much.

Jilly Goolden, Jancis Robinson and Oz Clarke have all tried over the years to hold viewers’ attention, and maybe even educate them along the way, but they were only ever a sideshow.

Wine needs its very own Jamie Oliver, and his equivalent may have arrived in the form of the actors Matthew Goode and Matthew Rhys. The two Matthews are front of house on a new program, The Wine Show. The schtick is that they spend the summer in a spectacularly beautiful villa in the Umbrian countryside, drinking wine that they drive around sourcing and learning about. Which is selfless of them.

There’s a resident expert, Joe Fattorini, and presenter Amelia Singer. It’s a combination of wine porn, travel porn and, given the handsomeness of the lead presenters, porn. Goode, who played Lady Mary’s love interest in the last series of Downton Abbey, can’t quite believe his luck in getting such a gig. He has his brother-in-law, the producer Russ Lindsay, to thank.

“Nepotism is alive and well,” he says gleefully. “[Russ] had already started filming with Joe and Amelia, and we were in a certain wine warehouse when he said wouldn’t it be a great idea if I took a presenting role on the show?

“That filled me with terror, because I’m not meant to look at a camera. I’m meant to ignore it.” The result is an hour-long show devoted to increasing our knowledge of wine. Not cookery with a bit of wine thrown in, just wine.

As someone whose wine decisions are based not on grape varieties or even food but on the weather — cold equals red; warm: white; hot: rose — this is not before time. What’s puzzling is why it took so long.

British wine production has grown into an industry worth £100 million ($174m), and the nation’s output is no longer a source of mirth: at a recent blind tasting, Parisian restaurateurs preferred English sparkling wines to champagne.

But for every Briton who’s a wine buff, there are 100 who, blindfolded, couldn’t tell the difference between a rioja and a riesling and who are intimidated by sommeliers when they go to a restaurant.

“I get intimidated,” insists Goode. “There’s definitely a fear of looking stupid, and there’s a slight tinge of snobbishness around the wine world, a slight PR problem.

“Particularly in the UK, it seems like a foreign thing because we haven’t been producing much of our own. But I think all the people who are starting to think more about food are starting to think about wine.

“Matthew and I get to be a couple of mischievous fools asking the questions, acting as a conduit for the people watching. We want to invite people into the world of wine and not find it off-putting.”

It is true that the program could do with some fine tuning. The banter can feel a little forced, which is ironic, because Rhys and Goode have actually been good mates since they met on the 2013 BBC drama Death Comes to Pemberley.

“You know when you click with someone, it seems like you’ve known each other for ages?” says Goode. “We’re like that. We’re like an old married couple now.”

They can overplay, too, the good cop/bad cop routine with Fattorini, and it’s a pity someone didn’t tell them about France before they recorded the line: “Italy — a place where food and wine dominate life like no other nation on earth.”

However, they also make you laugh. Shown one of those wine-stopper gadgets that sucks the air out of half-drunk bottles of wine, Goode looks at it as if baffled by the very idea, and says: “Yes, I’ve seen one of those. I’ve just never seen one in use.”

The BBC has been trying to educate its viewers entertainingly about wine since 1982 with Food & Drink. Why is talking about wine so hard? Goode is as baffled as the rest of us.

“I found it to be incredibly fun and informative. I remember Food & Drink — my parents used to enjoy watching it, but you’d just get five minutes of wine thrown in. Maybe that’s because of the perceived difficulties of talking about wine if you’re in a studio.

“It’s difficult to make that interesting, so this program was about the travel and culture and how the wine’s made. It’s not just watching someone pour wine down their throat. And we actually don’t do a huge amount of describing, we go ‘Ooh that’s nice’ and leave it to Joe.”

Goode owes much of what he knows about wine to his father. He encouraged him to try different things, explained why such and such a wine was good and where it was from, and allowed his son to make up his own mind.

“I’d have a little bit with Sunday lunch, a glass of madeira or bubbles at Christmas,” he says.

The best wine he has ever drunk? A Chateau Haut-Brion 1989, which he was given as a present. As parents of three children, Goode and his wife, the actress Sophie Dymoke, are happy subscribers to wine o’clock. His father’s gentle instruction in the art of wine is something he hopes to continue with his own children when they’re old enough — Ralph, the youngest, is nearly nine months; his daughters Teddie and Matilda are two and seven.

His new role as a TV presenter doesn’t mean he will be giving up acting, however. A day’s filming with Brad Pitt is on the cards. Friends who’ve worked with Pitt say he’s an absolute delight, Goode says. If nothing else, they’ll have wine in common: Goode cites the Chateau Miraval rose produced by Pitt and his wife Angelina Jolie at their Provencal estate as one of his favourite tipples.

Might there be a return to Downton Abbey? “Downton was great fun as long as you didn’t upset Maggie [Smith],” he says. Is she easily upset? “I’m only kidding,” he says, not entirely convincingly. “But you wouldn’t want to be on her bad side. It was very sad for them, Downton coming to an end, but I felt slightly distant from it because it was my first involvement. But I’m sure there will be a film made at some point and we’ll all get back together.” Until then, there’ll always be Chateau Miraval.

The Wine Show begins August 25 at 8.30pm on Foxtel’s Lifesyle Food.