The Fawlty approach to wine

“John Cleese’s Wine for the Confused,” airing Sunday night on the Food Network, is a show about class disguised as a show about booze disguised as a comedy.

Hosted by the famed Monty Python alumnus, it opens with an ode to wine that seems at first to promise an hour of the silly Brits and madcap goose-stepping on which Cleese made his reputation. “WHAHN!” a hilariously insufferable French-accented voice intones in the introduction. “Four sousand yearrs of tradeetion! Across zee ages, men and women of true disteenction have understood zee pleasures and zee possibilities....”

Suddenly Cleese steps in front of the camera, stands up straight and deadpans: “Well! That is quite enough of that!” Then he softens. Not for long, but it’s a sign that this is going to be more than a couple of yuks on a tasty subject.

“Isn’t it a shame,” he observes, “that this wonderful stuff, wine, can be the source of one human being being inferior or superior to another?”

Here it becomes clear how the 64-year-old Cleese, who lectures on creativity in his off hours and has co-written self-help books, came to be accused of late-breaking humorlessness in his native Great Britain.

“Don’t let anyone tell you what wine you should like,” he advises in the slightly filleted manner of a comedian who has excised the rage that fuels most comics. “Because people have different tastes. And we shall honor that.”

If “Wine for the Confused” is itself slightly confused -- part comedy, part adult education, part for the demographic that memorized great lines from “Life of Brian” in grad school, part for the America that drinks milk with dinner -- its format is utterly logical in terms of the evolution of lifestyle TV. In the era of cable, food shows have proliferated far past the point that anyone can get away anymore with merely cooking for the cameras. Product differentiation alone demands that something extra be brought to the table. Food porn isn’t enough; you gotta have a gimmick.

This is why Nigella Lawson keeps sucking her fingers on the Style Network and why Martha Stewart’s show remains an asset as she stews behind bars. This is why the Food Network has gradually augmented the “Bam!-ing” celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse with shows like “The Naked Chef,” with its hot young host, and the “Iron Chef,” which has the feel of a Japanese authoritarian game show, and “Dweezil & Lisa,” in which the cool pop stars Dweezil Zappa and Lisa Loeb engage in assorted culinary high jinks, and “Kitchen Accomplished,” which crosses high-end foodie culture with “This Old House” and “Extreme Makeover.”

What runs through most of these shows, though, is an unspoken promise that they will help viewers feel more equal by demystifying some of the more intimidating trappings of social class. In this respect, a show about wine aimed at ordinary people but hosted by a celebrity with a posh British accent is a natural next step. It must have been natural as well for Cleese, who has been lampooning wine snobs since his other British TV hit, “Fawlty Towers” (a spokeswoman for the Food Network said he brought the idea to them).

Like its host, “Wine for the Confused” is both enlightening and lighthearted. Tooling around in his Range Rover on back roads near the elegant ranch where he lives with his psychotherapist wife in Montecito, the tall mustachioed host makes sense of wine lingo and rubs fists full of dirt on his shirt before entering a rustic winery in Santa Barbara to make a joke about fitting in.

Cleese tells what wine the queen of England served when they dined together (it’s a little surprising) and lets viewers spy on a wine tasting at his home in which nice, well-dressed guests -- including another celebrity who is identified with the flashing words “another celebrity” when he walks in -- are unable to tell a $5 wine from a $200 one or even a red wine from a white one. And in one great bit, Cleese plays a sadistic sommelier out to humiliate a nervous restaurant patron -- a skit that leads to some valuable tips on how to order the wine you want without having to explicitly say “the cheapest one.”

Periodically, the definition of some wine term will pop onto the screen, which gives the show a sort of “Sesame Street”-for-grown-ups feeling, but it’s hard to say how else a term like “malolactic fermentation” might be made accessible to viewers who haven’t heard it before.

Overall, “Wine for the Confused” leaves viewers feeling nicely entertained, better informed and less snobbish. Not to mention thirsty for a nice glass of Pinot Noir.

*

‘John Cleese’s Wine for the Confused’

Where: Food Network

When: 10 p.m. Sunday

Rating: No rating

Host...John Cleese