A handy new Irish guide promises to take the guesswork out of buying wine. Joe Breen meets the man behind it.
John Wilson knows exactly what prompted his new annual guide, 101 Great Wines for Under €10. "It was two things. I do a lot of wine talks, and every time you talk about good wines that are available in the supermarket, people's eyes light up; they start getting interested. The other thing is that there has been a huge change in the Irish wine business in the past two or three years. Aldi and Lidl came in and gave everyone a huge fright [ with their price structure].
"The downside now is that there is a huge amount of almost undrinkable wine on the market. The good side is that there were a lot of wines that were in the €10-12 bracket that are now priced at under €10. So producers, importers and retailers have sharpened up their act here considerably. The result is that you can now get very decent wine at between €8 and €10. That got me thinking - could I find 101 such wines? And, in fact, there are many more than that which I would be very happy to sit down and drink."
Wilson is a respected figure in the Irish wine business: quietly spoken and mannerly but authoritative and relatively animated when it comes to speaking about wine, his favourite subject. "I'm in the business 15 years. When I left school I hadn't a clue as to what I wanted to do. I went to Trinity and studied history and still didn't know what I wanted to do. I then spent a couple of years, to my parents' horror, doing absolutely nothing. I'd always been interested in food. I thought about becoming a chef but was put off by every chef I talked to. But wine was becoming a growing interest, and I decided that, if I was going to do it for the next 40 years, I would get in there now. So I joined Mitchell's back in the mid-1980s and have been involved in the wine trade in one form or another, both here and in the UK, ever since."
Today Wilson edits the annual The Best of Wine in Ireland, is involved in numerous wine-related projects and contributes a weekly column to the Sunday Tribune. But this small, handy-sized guide appealed to another side of him. "I have a sort of geeky interest in whether or not Jacob's Creek Chardonnay is better than Wolf Blass Chardonnay or better than San Pedro Chardonnay from Chile. People who write about wine generally love it, and they go for the more interesting wines, and the subject is more interesting on that level, obviously. However, I do sometimes feel that the consumer, the person who reads the book or the newspaper, gets left out at times."
Hence the guide, which aims "to take the guesswork out of buying a bottle of wine", almost holding your hand as you buy. The wines are divided into self-explanatory sections, such as "light and refreshing whites", and each wine gets a page, with its basic details - name, area, price, alcohol and grape variety - plus a short description of the wine and where it can be bought. It is perfect for the casual drinker who enjoys a glass or two but doesn't want to go any deeper or spend any more than is necessary - in short, the bulk of Irish consumers.
"Well, we are all drinking more wine now. When I joined the wine business I was considered a weirdo by all my friends, who were afraid to talk to me about wine. Now it is quite a normal thing for people to sit down to dinner on a Wednesday night and have two glasses of inexpensive wine - that's a huge change . . . The new drinker might drink in front of the TV or with their wife or their husband at dinner on a weekday night. That's a big change. So you see a lot less expensive wine being drunk."
And does cheap wine lead on to more expensive wine? "For some people, yes. Some people would never go beyond €10. They believe it's just not worth it, and I've no problem with that, so long as they don't argue that wine at €10 is as good as wine at €15, because most of the time it isn't . . . I think 60 per cent of wine-buying is under €10, but if you look at every article, certainly nothing like 60 per cent [ of the wines written about] are wines under €10."
He says that Spain, Italy and Portugal are three countries still with huge potential. "Spain has volume, Portugal has fascinating grape varieties, but I think the big one that is going to hit us is Argentina, because they are the fourth-largest-producing country in the world. And then there is South Africa, which is now really beginning to produce some exciting wines. I love Italian wines, because they are so different, and if they could ever get their act together they could really make a dent in the Irish market. The most disappointing thing has been the [ wine industry in the] whole of eastern Europe, which hasn't happened."
He adds: "What I would like to say about this book is that I haven't ignored the smaller retailer, because a lot of people are intimidated by wine and by wine shops. In fact most people who work in wine shops are friendly - and only dying to tell you about their less expensive wines as well as their more expensive ones. And because they have taken great care in selecting them, they generally do have great wines under €10, so don't be put off and think that you have to go to your local supermarket, because your local wine merchant will have wines under €10."
So how many wines did he taste for the guide? "Every tasting I went to in the last year, I went in and put my head down and tasted everything under €10. I didn't taste the €20 or the €30 bottle. I said if it's not under €10 I don't want to know. In the early part of the summer I had about 500 red wines sent to me, and I tasted all of them and narrowed it down."
And did he drink it all? "No, no. Generally I don't drink Monday to Friday. My neighbours in Greystones love me; they get bottles of wines with two sips taken out of them. I keep copious notes. I'm fascinated by doing it; I love doing it, and I can do it day after day. To me it is a fascinating exercise, but I don't lorry it down, ever. In fact you don't feel like drinking wine after you've tasted 24 wines. You want a beer."
101 Great Wines for Under €10, by John Wilson, is published by A&A Farmar, €7.99