Joe Breen reads a downloadable guide to bottles in Ireland
A humble €3.99 may not buy you much in the way of wine. But it will get you an electronic version of Martin Moran's Wine Republic 2006, a fascinating and tendentious journey through wine in Ireland and beyond, by a colourful and knowledgeable commentator.
Moran has published Wine Republic as an annual print guide for some years; this version comes as a PDF file, which means you need only download Adobe's free Reader program to view it.
Moran has more than 23 years experience in the wine trade. As the introduction to the e-book puts it: "He has poured wine in restaurants and hotels in London; sold wine in Dublin, London, Paris, New York and Sydney; picked grapes in Alsace, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Buxy, Chablis, Bordeaux and southern England; grown grapes in England; fermented wine in England, Alsace, Beaujolais, Bordeaux, Adelaide and the Hunter Valley; blended it in France, Argentina and England; and, naturally, drunk it all over the world."
He passed the difficult master of wine exam in 1994 and has earned the right to an opinion. He is rarely without one that isn't grounded in his encyclopedic knowledge.
He ends an illuminating analysis of the downside of discounted wine, for example, with the observation: "The increased industrialisation of food production has led to cutting corners, fraud, and foot and mouth. Cheap commodity wine may not threaten your health, other than by perhaps boring you to death . . . but do we really want to end up like Britain, with the vast majority of the population drinking dull, dilute, cheap, alcoholic fruit juice masquerading as wine?"
He is equally colourful on the subject of screw caps versus cork. Having summed up the debate, he comments: "Basically, screw caps work for both red and white, for both short- and long-term storage. You may hear otherwise, but there is a mass of evidence in their favour. They aren't without their problems, but those problems are in the control of the wine-maker, unlike cork . . . The unhappiest people are sommeliers, who have fewer opportunities to pose and act as they draw the cork and proffer it to you to sniff."
There is much more, besides. His Hot 100 wines include many bargains and interesting choices. For that alone, €3.99 seems very good value indeed. Visit www.winerepublic.com to buy his guide.