SUSY Atkins is a breath of fresh air in what can be the rather stuffy world of wine.

You’ll recognise her from BBC1’s Saturday Kitchen, when whatever she recommends sells off the shelves in a matter or hours.

She will also be in town to entertain and educate you this weekend at the Oxford Castle Food & Wine Festival on the delights of sparkling wine, as well as officially opening the festival with Raymond Blanc.

What you might not know is that Suzy is Oxford born and bred, growing up in North Oxford and Eynsham, where her parents still live. An Oxford High School girl, she went on to Cambridge to study English. But it wasn’t until she worked in the local off licence in Eynsham that she fell in love with wine.

“I always wanted to be a journalist, and hoped to specialise in food, but as I grew more and more interested in wine things went from there really and I grabbed the first available job on Wine Magazine while going to evening classes and taking wine exams,” she laughs.

“But that was a long, long time ago.”

Now happily living in Devon with her husband and two children, wine is now her full-time obsession. Regularly tasting 100 wines a day, she has her own wine-tasting room at home, and her family know better than to disturb her at work.

She also has lots of friends and neighbours who are the happy recipients of her tasting sessions. “I faithfully spit the wine out after I taste it,” Susy tells me. “And while at the end of the night I might have a glass of my favourite wine, the rest I give away. So people know not to bring wine to my house because we have so much of it already that it’s not a welcome gift. Put it this way, I get lots or chocolates and flowers,” she grins.

When Susy started out, wine was still for snobby connoisseurs and Susy knew if she could make drinking wine an everyday possibility, the masses would follow.

“They needed a normal person talking to normal people about wine and I fitted the bill” she says. “New world wines were beginning to arrive by the ocean-load and people wanted to know what to drink,” she says simply.

That she is very passionate, amenable and enthusiastic also helps no end, which is why Susy also writes a regular weekly column for The Sunday Telegraph, is the drinks editor of Delicious magazine and has written books including the best-selling, fun pocket-book Girls’ Guide to Wine.

“I am spectacularly busy,” she tells me “because I do quite a lot of food shows like this around the country. But I’m delighted to be coming to Oxford because it’s my home town. And I’ve never met Raymond Blanc before,” she adds, “So I’m really looking forward to it.”

So is Susy on a mission? “Yes,” she says decisively, “to stop people buying bogoff big brand wines and start being more adventurous. But they don’t know where to start when they go to supermarkets these days, which is where I come in.

But still, a big responsibility then?

“Well, there are bigger things in life. It’s not a military manoeuvre,” Susy smiles. In essence, you don’t need to take your wine too seriously, Susy does all that for you.

THIS weekend’s Oxford Castle Food & Wine Festival will see the region’s best food and drinks producers showcasing their wares. With live cooking demonstrations, wine tasting classes, dietary discussions, and some of the world’s best chefs revealing their Kitchen Secrets, Oxford Castle Food & Wine Festival will give you some truly great cooking ideas by stimulating your brain as well as tantalising your taste buds. Go to oxfordcastle.com for more details.