The man who sold the New World

I started drinking at the age of three. We were having a picnic on the banks of the river. My brother was drowning in the weir. My father was trying to rescue him. My mother was having hysterics. And there was this bottle of my mum’s damson wine. No one was looking, so I drank it. Delicious.’

I’m reworking, reshaping, rewriting, revising my book Oz Clarke on Wine (see p22). That’s the first paragraph of the book. It goes on: ‘That put me off drinking till I was 18.’ Well, it was 19, actually. But why is this relevant? Because the world I grew up in was a wine-less world.

What happened during those 16 lost years? Nothing. Other people who end up in the wine