Irish wine taking root in Dublin: ThePost.ie


TCH Archives > Sunday Business Post > 2006/11/12 > Irish wine taking root in Dublin

Irish wine taking root in Dublin
Sunday, November 12, 2006 - By Tomas Clancy
The vineyard owner pulls back leaves and crouches down to harvest two more plump bunches of dark-skinned grapes. Despite the sunshine overhead, I envy him his thick woolly hat as my body becomes numb with the cold.

The grape harvest nears completion as another couple of rows of beautifully ripe vines are snipped and pulled towards the winery.

In the distance is neither the high planes of the Ribera del Duero nor the river banks of the Loire, but the Dublin mountains and the steam that rises from St James’s Gate brewery. I am in David Llewellyn’s Lusk vineyards on the north Dublin coast as the 2006 Irish vintage is collected.

Llewellyn’s cellar is not as grand as Chateau Lafite, nor as modern as a Napa Valley winery. It is essentially a large barn with a press and a small de-stemming machine, exactly as you would find in any winery in the world.

The barn has the sweet, oily, jam-like smell of a working winery, typical of those in the Rhone or Rhine.

Here, the grapes are hand-harvested in whole, firm bunches and poured into the de-stemmer. They are then crushed and collected in barrels and tanks. The barrels are moved indoors and the winemaking process begins.

In Ireland, just as in most of the New World, yeast is added to get the fermentation going.

A skin then forms on top of the barrels.

In a process that the French term pigeage Llewellyn breaks up the skin and stirs it around the barrel. ‘‘The more often you can do this during this initial period the better the colour you achieve with your red wine,” he says.

After the fermentation ceases - which in the Irish climate can be weeks rather than days - the wine is wracked or cleaned to remove all the skins and pulp, and left to clarify.

Llewellyn’s barrels are resin food grade tanks of the kind found in rustic French and Italian wineries, rather than the sweet, expensive oak barrels of a classic winery.

I am to taste wine harvested over the last month, which Llewellyn says will not have finished fermenting and has not been clarified. Tentatively, I grip my glass and offer it over the barrels.

‘‘I won’t tell you what this is,” he says, pouring out a cloudy white liquid. The wine smells almost miraculous with distinct grassy, green gooseberry notes. It tastes fresh, with clean, lime-like touches and a building sweetness that thankfully was cut short.

‘‘It’s a sauvignon blanc,” says Llewellyn with some pride.

‘‘From Lusk,” I confirm.

‘‘Yep,” says Llewellyn. ‘‘It is the wine that seems to attract the most interest at the farmers’ markets where I sell it.

‘‘A woman asked me a couple of weeks ago for two cases to put aside for Christmas presents.”

Llewellyn is a well-known player on the Dublin horticultural scene. His wine sells in farmers’ markets such as the Sunday market in the People’s Park, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin.

His successful apple juice and cider-making business is the heart of his operation in Fingal County. He also grows vines for sale as plants. The Vintry in Rathgar has sported one of his cabernet sauvignon vines for many years.

He grows cabernet sauvignon, merlot and several other grape varietals under polytunnels for sale as gifts rather than vine stock. However, the future of the Irish wine growing business may be found in another grape grown in Lusk: rondo.

Before we expect Irish wine drinkers to replace their penchant for Chilean merlot with AC Galway Bay pinot noir let us travel just 58 miles east, to Wales and beyond to England, where almost 400 commercial wineries cover around 2,000 acres of vineyards.

Of those 400 commercial wineries, around 30 are considerable operations that make and export still and sparkling wines. The Denbies wine estate in Dorking, Surrey, has 265 acres of vineyards planted with 18 varieties of grapes. It makes over a dozen different styles of wines. Its large functioning cellars look and smell just like their French, German and Spanish equivalents.

However, its wine tours and tastings operation shows the real potential for an Irish wine business. Cellar door sales are the mainstay of many smaller British wineries. These are wines that do not leave the country, but end up in the trunks of visitor’s cars.

Much of German and Australian wine is sold in the same way, and this could be true of Ireland.

Wine making and vineyard cultivation does not share the same popularity in Ireland as in Britain for one simple reason - Ireland was not invaded by the Romans. The Romans brought to Britain the skill and will to plant vineyards. The vineyards fell into disuse during the Middle Ages, but revived with the Norman invasion in 1066.However, by the time the Normans arrived in Ireland, they appeared to have lost their vine-planting momentum.

Planting of British vineyards resumed after World War II, in tandem with the rise of private motoring, growing affluence and interest in and consumption of wine. During the same period, Irish agriculture was in thrall to sugar beet, milk quotas and set aside. The ambitious turned their attention to dairy farming and beef.

Every sizeable vineyard in Britain and Wales has a good restaurant, cafe, shop and many have accommodation to attract corporate weekenders.

An Irish wine business could aim for the same.

However, before we see the building of an Irish wine tourism business, we need to see Irish vineyards produce one or two successful commercial vintages - wine that can be drunk for pleasure and not just as an adventurous exercise in curiosity.

I have tried several Irish wines over the years and they were generally awful. Two exceptions were in Cork, Longueville House Hotel, Mallow, and the Thomas Walk vineyard in Kinsale. The wines from these enterprises were of entirely creditable quality, very close to a light German white wine and, in the case of Amurensis Walk wine, a light Beaujolais.

Both were commercial wines in taste.

The rondo grape in Lusk is a hybrid cross of Zarya Severa - a new variety to me - and St Laurent, which produces terrific reds across eastern Europe and Austria. It was first produced by a Professor V Kraus in Czechoslovakia in 1964. It matures early and is resistant to frost and harsh Irish climatic conditions. It ripens well in an Irish summer and produces a pretty deep ruby red wine with a velvety, almost merlot-like wash.

I stood in a field in Ireland in the open air, not under tunnels or glass, with rows of rondo that have produced a wine of real, creditable quality. Llewellyn is still experimenting. Next year he wants to use oak and try a few different blends.

He has produced several different varieties of grapes in small runs of different wines.

Not all have been successful, but the rondo red and the sauvignon blanc stand out as clear winners.

For the moment, Irish wine seems fated to remain a marginal curiosity. It is nonetheless a story of tantalising possibilities and opportunity.

E-mail the wine column at tc@iol.ie