You don’t often see Ian Botham look intimidated. He walks the length of Britain for charity. He opines on cricket in a lordly manner for Sky Sports. He stands up for the health-giving virtues of a well-known breakfast cereal. At these highly public moments, intimidation is not visibly part of his repertoire.

Get him on The F Word, though, Gordon Ramsay’s fast-spliced, shouty, sweary cookery show for Channel 4, and a different Botham emerges – one for whom the world seems an uncertain and potentially trap-strewn place; a Botham with highly coloured cheeks, a firmly set jaw and whose eyes flicker hauntingly over the cameraman’s shoulder, as if awaiting the entry of some blessed redeemer, sent to save him.

But why would this surprise us, given that the cricket legend was there to take part in this week’s celebrity wine-tasting challenge? For this to work, Ramsay needs a celebrity who has put his or her name to a commercially available bottle of wine. That way, the chef can organise a blind-tasting of six wines, slip the celebrity’s product to them and see how far up their nose turns.

The competition’s crowning moment to date came when Sir Cliff Richard indicated that he wouldn’t go near a certain red unless forced that way by people wielding electric prods – and it turned out to be his brand.

There is no such thing as bad publicity, they say, but they are wrong because there is. Bad publicity is going on The F Word and failing to recognise, or even mildly enjoy, your own wine. Ramsay is still dissing Sir Cliff’s produce even now. “It’s shocking,” he said this week. “It’s s***. I wouldn’t even put that in my bolognese.”

Incidentally, the “strong language” advisory that goes out before The F Word is not unjustified. In the interests of statistical accuracy, and as a small tribute to the spirit of the late Mary Whitehouse, I spent this week’s edition of the show attempting to keep a strong word count, in five-bar gate form, in a notebook, but gave up after about five minutes when I had reached 21. Truly, Ramsay has taken on-screen swearing to new levels. Only Barry Fry has got away with swearing this much on television, in such a short space of time.

Anyway, it was Botham’s turn with the wine and the tension was tangible. Cricketers do like their wine. Botham, David Gower, Bob Willis, Michael Atherton – each of them would declare wine to be an “interest”.

The source (or sauce) of Michael Vaughan’s bewilderment in the lobby of a Manchester hotel this week? Fine wines, you can be almost certain. You don’t find this so much with footballers, or even rugby players. But between cricket and an “interest” in wine there appears to be a firm bond. History amply demonstrates that some nights a cricketer will be merely quite interested in wine. Other nights, he will be totally and utterly interested in it.

Now, cynics will declare that, in these cases, an “interest” in wine – as opposed to an “interest” in bottled lager – is a means of getting thoroughly clobbered while retaining at least some degree of intellectual respectability. We wouldn’t care to comment. We would prefer simply to note that Botham is interested enough in wine that he has become commercially involved in the produce of a South Australian vineyard.

Hence his unease on The F Word – an unease founded on the knowledge that Ramsay would feed Botham some of that produce in a disguised form during the course of the celebrity wine challenge and that the penalty for coughing it into a spittoon in traumatised contempt would be abject humiliation and, possibly, the collapse of a business.

It didn’t happen. Botham recognised his own wine. Indeed, he described it as “well-made” and preferred it to Sir Cliff’s, in a cunning little head-to-head that Ramsay had organised to maximise the humiliation, if it happened.

However, by then it was too late because Botham’s humiliation was complete. In the first round of the test, Ramsay had offered him, blind, a glass of Montrachet retailing at £106 a bottle. Botham winced as if it were vinegar. “With my palate, I wouldn’t drink that,” the cricketer announced, a little grandly. He then sucked down the contents of glass No 2 and awarded it the honour of his favour – only to learn, too late, that it was a plonk from the vineyard of Barry Manilow.

Ramsay was jubilant. “I can’t believe you and Barry Manilow share the same nose,” he crowed. (I don’t wish to call into doubt the chef’s spontaneity, but my feeling was that he had that line ready. The big giveaway: there is no swearing in it. Hats off to him if I’m wrong, though.)

Botham, one fears, will be a long time coming back from this. But there’s a lesson, of course, and it is this: if you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. Especially Gordon Ramsay’s.