Jancis Robinson
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 27 October 1996
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the wine writer Jancis Robinson.
One of only 200 Masters of Wine in the world, she recalls how her passion was first aroused by a full-bodied Chambolle-Musigny. It was, she says, the first time she realised that wine was an intellectual experience and not just for lubrication. A familiar face on television for her Matters of Taste and Wine Course series, she also edited the prestigious Oxford Companion to Wine. But her main occupation is tasting, and she can sip and spit more than a hundred varieties at a sitting.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Sabat Mater Inflammatus Et Accensus by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi Book: Middlemarch by George Eliot Luxury: Cellar of wines and a corkscrew
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.2 | The program was originally broadcast in 1996 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an author and television presenter. |
| 0:33.0 | She's also a master of wine, a woman who's achieved a position of unusual influence |
| 0:38.0 | in a world traditionally dominated by men. |
| 0:41.0 | The subject of her books and television programs is wine and sometimes food too, where |
| 0:45.6 | her fluent no-nonsense approach has made her popular with millions of readers and viewers. Her |
| 0:50.7 | wine course was recently shown on BBC too and she's also edited the |
| 0:54.9 | Oxford Companion to Wine. Although no bon Vivi, she confesses I prefer to drink |
| 1:00.3 | wine, not talk about it. She is Jansis Robinson. Is that because wine talk, |
| 1:05.9 | Jansis has become a rather affected business with a cheeky little wine, a hint of tobacco here? |
| 1:11.0 | I think it's because what's important about wine isn't words. It's the |
| 1:14.4 | sensation that it creates inside your system, inside your brain, sometimes inside |
| 1:19.6 | your soul, certainly your heart. And really, language is not designed to describe something as private and as variable |
| 1:30.0 | and as subjective as that reaction between a liquid and your nose, which is actually what it's all about. |
| 1:37.0 | But you make it sound as if it's more than an experience of the senses, as if it's something intellectual as as well is it? I think it is if you want it to be and that's certainly why I'm I can't believe I've been so lucky as to have a life which has been devoted to this thing which gives everyone so much |
| 1:55.2 | pleasure but is so much deeper than that because yeah each each bottle of |
| 2:00.7 | wine comes with a story it comes comes with a bit of history. |
| 2:04.1 | But if I gave you two glasses of white wine and one was an Australian, a good Australian |
| 2:10.0 | chardine and the other was a French chnay with all the history and the skill that goes into that. |
| 2:16.3 | Would you know immediately, would your palate tell you which was which? |
| 2:18.6 | I think Australian Chardonnay in particular has a particular style and you talk as though the Australian |
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