Remember Jilly Goolden, the effervescent wine expert who starred with Michael Barry and Oz Clarke in the BBC series Food and Drink? She’s the one who says the gamay grape, from which Beaujolais is made, is reminiscent of jogging on a summer’s day — the smell of slightly burning rubber on melted tarmac, not of sweaty feet and armpits.
Jilly is now reinventing herself as a wine tutor, offering lessons to groups of 14 in the Wine Room at her house near Ashdown Forest, East Grinstead.
One person she wants to take part is the thin teenage post-room assistant who worked at The Field’s then head office in Stratton Street, Mayfair, where she had her first job as a picture researcher and sub-editor in the late Sixties.
“It was Bill Nighy, I remember him well,” she bubbles. “It was his first job, too. I think he would be a brilliant wine taster.”
