For St. Patrick's Day, wine with Irish spirit

Jon Bonné Lifestyle editor • Profile

St. Patrick’s Day arrives shortly, time to toast the luck of the Irish and the joys of Celtic heritage with a glass of … wine.

And why not? True, Ireland has a reputation for appreciating a proper pint of stout or a dram of whiskey. But Irish émigrés have played a pivotal role in the world’s wine trade since the early 1700s, decades before young Arthur Guinness signed a lease on a certain Dublin brewery.

“Their names and labels have become synonymous with fine wine throughout the world,” says Ted Murphy, author of “A Kingdom of Wine” (OnStream), a history of Ireland’s ties to wine published last year. “It’s quite a remarkable achievement.”

These ties can be found almost anywhere wine grapes are grown, from northern France to South America. Respected California wineries like Chateau Montelena and Murphy-Goode claim ties to Mother Ireland, as do some of Bordeaux’s most renowned negociants and wineries. At least 14 chateaus there are named for Irishmen, including such long-established properties as Lynch-Bages, founded by Michel Lynch, a French-born descendant of the Lynches of Galway. Their wine ties date back to the 14th century.

“You go into that winery and there’s pictures of the Lynches from Ireland,” says Kingsley Aikins, president and CEO of the American Ireland Fund in Boston. “You’re going back hundreds of years with this stuff.”

These well-documented ties have inspired a sort of informal brotherhood of Irish winemakers, known as the Wine Geese or Winegeese — complete with its own Irish-based order, founded in 1997, and a museum in County Cork. Aikins’ association runs an American counterpart, the WineGeese Society (membership starts at $1,000) whose events celebrate the Irish role in fine wine.

Leaving for Europe
The Wine Geese hearken from the Wild Geese, Irish citizens who left their homeland after the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and settled across Europe, often serving in continental armies.  Some who landed across the water turned their eyes to the burgeoning wine trade — notably in the entrepreneurial streets of Bordeaux, where as early as 1725 they found willing customers among their countrymen back home. Murphy estimates that in 1739-40, Ireland imported 4,400 tons of red Bordeaux wine, four times what the wine-loving English brought in.

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“Ireland was drinking more claret than England,” he says. “In fact, we were drinking more claret than the rest of the British Isles put together.”

The list of Irish wine luminaries is impressive. In France, the roster includes not only the Lynches, but Mark Kirwan of Galway, who established Chateau Kirwan in Margaux and Bernard Phelan of Tipperary, who founded Chateau Phelan-Segur in St Estephe. (Phelan-Segur, like Kirwan and Lynch-Bages, have since been sold to non-Irish owners.)

There’s also the Barton family, whose Bordeaux roots stretch back to 1725, when Thomas Barton, like many foreigners, established a negociant firm outside the city walls. His grandson Hugh took a French partner named Daniel Guestier and formed Barton & Guestier, now one of France’s largest wine exporters. Hugh later purchased two chateaus and attached the family name. Léoville-Barton and Langoa-Barton should be familiar to many wine collectors.

Equally influential was Richard Hennessy of Cork, who so impressed his countrymen back home with the cognac he exported from France that his family set up its own distillery. The success of the Hennessy cognac business speaks for itself.

The list is just as long on these shores. James Concannon, born in the Aran Islands, settled in California’s Livermore Valley in 1883, one of the first wine pioneers in the area; his family has made wine there ever since. Napa stars like Mayacamas, Cakebread and Flora Springs all claim Irish ties. Mat Garretson of Paso Robles’ Garretson Wine Company labels his wines with Irish names, including a “Saothar” rosé (“classic work” in Irish) and a syrah called “The Craic” (“good times”). In Oregon, Belfast native David O’Reilly crafts wines under his own name as well as the Owen Roe label, a tribute to 17th-century Irish patriot Owen Roe O’Neill.

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