You might be more inclined to drink whiskey or stout to celebrate St Patrick’s Day, but if you fancy a wine, it’s not that difficult to find one with some kind of Irish connection. True, they don’t make much wine in Ireland, but there are a few small producers, such as Lusca, whose wines you can find in the Celtic Whiskey Shop in Dublin. But the quantities it’s made in are tiny and the prices correspondingly high. Ireland’s climate doesn’t lend itself to large-scale winemaking.
Irish-born winemakers are making wine elsewhere, however, including, interestingly, one of the best producers of sparkling wine in the UK, Dermot Sugrue, who until relatively recently was winemaker at Wiston and is now making top-notch fizz under his own label, Sugrue South Downs (see today’s pick below). Having written about burgundy recently, I haven’t included Roísín Curley in this round-up, but she has a great backstory (she’s a Master of Wine who’s also a pharmacist) and is well rated by my colleagues across the Irish Sea.
