Joy of Wine (tour)

Like the cheap plonk handed out to the audience, The Joy of Wine is not vintage stuff. The complimentary battery acid on offer lacked all the attributes of a decent vin: sans nose, sans taste, sans length. Which, essentially, sums up the show.

The premise of Andrew Jones‘ and Ciaran Murtagh‘s script is that the whole business of wine is funny. Fair enough. The tasting, the pretentiousness, indeed, the procedure of spitting and swirling is ripe for a piss-take. All that, I-can-taste-peaches-and-blackberries talk by wine buffs is so-much nonsense when all we ever do when we choose a wine is to select red or white. Oh, and look at the price.

However, the wine industry need not worry. The writers’ targets do not include the EU Wine Lake, subsidised French vineyards, the alleged re-corking and re-labelling of gallons of the stuff each year to make a quick profit, or the illegal additives that are sometimes detected. Oz Clark, Jancis Robinson and Company can all sleep easy in their Superplonk beds.

This is not a savage satire so much as two overgrown schoolboys having grape fun with puns about vines and wine, and using lots of physical comedy and naughty jokes to raise a laugh a minute. And on that level The Joy of Wine is very funny.

In performing the piece, Jones and Murtagh slurp their way through a series of sketches in the best traditions of the fringe. Some hit the spot, some do not. But never mind, like a good wine-tasting evening, another one will be along in a minute in Cal McCrystal’s production. There are some fine monologues including the teenage joys of drinking Blue Nun on a park bench, an excellent piece of choreography as the two performers dance in only their underpants, and a wine waiter sketch where the diner is never going to be allowed to choose the wine.

It’s just a shame that, in sequences such as the Wine Fascists, the writers don’t spit in the faces of the industry’s sacred cows. It seems a missed opportunity and leaves an aftertaste of something put together for the back room of a university pub: extremely funny but not a classic. House red not Claret.

– Harry Mottram