David Llewellyn pushes open a thick polystyrene panel and steps out of the winter chill, into his cluttered shed where a wall heater glows red. Wine bottles line a table. “I have to warm them up so the labels stick better,” he laughs.
It is an uncommon problem for a wine producer to have — but then Ireland, long famed for its whiskey and Guinness, is not your typical winemaking country. A combination of climate change and hybrid grapes, adapted to lower temperatures and resistant to fungus, is making wine-growing increasingly popular here.
One such hybrid grape — Rondo — has gone from strength to strength.
Last month, Llewellyn, who grows his wine in Lusk, north of Dublin, won one “grand gold” and two gold medals in a prestigious international contest for hybrid varieties — a category also known as “Piwi”, from the German for fungi-resistant.
“It gives them a bit of credibility,” said Llewellyn. “Because the automatic reaction to Irish wine tends to be ‘yeah, that sounds interesting, but who’s going to drink that?’”
Experts say there are now more than 40 vineyards across the country.
Colm McCan, a wine educator at Ireland’s famous Ballymaloe Cookery School in County Cork, said: “The word is trickling out . . . We are an emerging cool climate wine region.”
Despite its newcomer status on the world wine stage, Ireland has been trading, enjoying and spreading wine culture for millennia. Archaeological fragments are believed to indicate that the ancient Celts were importing the drink as far back as 500BC.
In the eighth century, St Bede, an English monk and scholar, wrote that Ireland “abounds in milk and honey, nor is there any want of vines”, while Norsemen from Limerick paid a casket of wine — enough for every day of the year — to Brian Boru, High King of Ireland, in the 11th century. In 1740 alone, Ireland imported 4,000 caskets from Bordeaux.
But the contribution to the global industry of a country whose most popular tipple today is Guinness, and whose whiskeys bring in €875mn in exports, came through the so-called wine geese — businessmen who fled Ireland in the 17th century after the climate turned repressive for Catholics.
They went on to set up prestigious vineyards and distilleries, including Hennessy of cognac fame, Château Lynch-Bages and Léoville Barton.
But few Irish wines made in Ireland today are commercially available and those that are carry hefty price tags, reflecting their minuscule scale.
“Wine in Ireland isn’t really a scene. It’s a niche for a few crazy people,” said Llewellyn, a horticulturalist by training who also grows apples, pears and cherries and produces cider and perry on his farm in Lusk.
Besides Rondo, he also grows some Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot and some Cabernet Franc and Shiraz, from which he makes a Bordeaux-style red wine, an elegant rosé and white “blanc de noir” sparkling wines.
While the Rondo grapes can ripen outdoors in Ireland, for those traditional varieties, he has to rely on long plastic tents covering the plants, known as polytunnels, to achieve full ripeness — a method some winemakers look down their noses at. “If they ever ripen in Ireland, the human race is already extinct everywhere else in the world,” he said.
However, Carlo Rizzini and his son Alberto grow Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot on the shores of Lough Owel in County Westmeath in central Ireland without using polytunnels -— a method they view as “cheating”.
Rizzini said in 2023 their first in production achieved yields “the same or higher than in Northern Italy” at more than two bottles per plant.
However, David Dennison, a sommelier who produces certified organic wines and fruit liqueurs, said 2024 was a “very challenging year”.
He sought to turn that obstacle into opportunity: instead of producing white wine from his small crop of Solaris grapes — another popular hybrid — he co-fermented them with Rondo to make an “exciting” ruby red.
Dennison, who also runs wine tours and tastings, this year also produced “probably one of our best reds, now in oak barrels” and two pét-nat sparkling wines. He is in the process of expanding his vineyard.
He described aficionados of Irish wine “the purists — they’re very few. They must have disposable income because our wines are not cheap.”
But small can be beautiful.
Chef JP McMahon, who serves Llewellyn’s wines and those from another vineyard — The Old Roots in County Wexford in south-east Ireland — in his Michelin-starred restaurant Aniar in Galway, said it was a “fascinating time for Irish wine”.
He offered a glass of Llewellyn’s sparkling wine, which he rated “as good as a champagne or a cava”, on arrival. “We have a lot of American guests and it literally just took off — we couldn’t keep enough in stock.”
He also pairs Irish reds with game and lamb.
Ireland’s modern-day wine efforts owe much to Thomas Walk, a pioneering winemaker in Kinsale in County Cork on Ireland’s south coast, who believes his is the world’s oldest cultivation of Rondo, which he planted in the early 1980s.
Walk, a former blue water sailor who settled in Ireland 40 years ago, now only grows Rondo, having obtained the vines, then only identified by a research number, from a German grape breeding institute.
Walk — who, like Dennison and Llewellyn, has won awards for his wine — labels hybrids a “new horizon”, describing them to traditional wines what bitcoin is to the dollar. Because they do not need spraying with fungicides, they appeal to consumers’ desire for natural and sustainable products, he said.
Dennison agreed. “They’re the future of winemaking, not just in our climate, but in other climates,” he said.
Dermot Sugrue, an Irishman hailed as one of the best winemakers in England, saw bright prospects too. “In the next few years, we could see quite a few brand new Irish wine brands emerge,” he said.
In his shed in Lusk, Llewellyn carefully affixes a label by hand, including a sticker highlighting his new award. He is expanding his vineyard, “taking a gamble” that he can again hit gold despite the hit-and-miss Irish weather. “It’s a labour of love.”
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