PICTURE it this Christmas. In the limestone village of Liscannor on the fringe of the Burren, a cosy Victorian pub with a blazing hearth. Like so many pubs, P.J. Egan's is a secure winter refuge from real life, with dusty old wine bottles as decoration, wide, wooden armchairs for corpulent drinkers and light bulbs thoughtfully sprayed orange to spare customers that anaemic look intoxication occasionally entails.
Like many a pub, it will bustle over the next few days with farmers and fisherman and returned emigrants and refugees fleeing New Year in the city. There is one big difference, however, which you may detect as patrons struggle homewards with heavy boxes. P.J. Egan's is a wine business of the most serious sort - a place that can meet the most stringent demands for superlative Christmas claret.
It is seven years now since Patrick Egan came back from London with his Peruvian wife, Charo, to take over the pub. "I'd been away for 22 years when I got a present of it from my aunt," he explains. "I had been working in London as an architect, but by 1989 only 6,000 architects out of 38,000 were employed. It was a pretty straightforward choice - either Liscannor or end up under the arches of Charing Cross."
He was 40 that year - the same age as his grandfather when, in 1911, he arrived from New York and opened RJ. Egan's. "His father had emigrated from here years before," says Patrick. "My grandfather decided to travel in the opposite direction. He intended to work at tailoring but the Liscannor quarries had just started and there were a lot of thirsty men. A pub seemed a good idea.
Although Grandfather Egan was interested in wine and sold good claret up to the time of his death in the mid-1950s, the aunt who took over ran the business mainly as a grocery, with drink sales confined to the occasional bottle of gin or small Paddy's. Even though he had never worked in a bar in his life, Patrick knew from the moment he accepted her offer that he would turn Egan's into a pub again. Not only that, but it would sell wine again because years of living next to Julie's Wine Bar in Holland Park had turned him into a fine wine fanatic.
"People thought I was mad to get into wine," he recalls, "but I loved Bordeaux and by then I knew what the good stuff was. My first thought was that now, at last, I could buy it at trade prices. I never did any wine courses - I educated myself by drinking. I'm always amazed to hear 20-year-old sommeliers waxing lyrical. I honestly believe you need to drink wine for years and years to be able to talk about it."
It took two years, he says, to build up the wine business initially buying rare 1961s at auction, then gradually buying from a small number of negociants.
Slowly but steadily, as his stock of top clarets expanded, the word spread that Egan's in Liscannor was the place to go if you wanted anything from Cru Bourgeois level all the way up to the legendary First Growth glories - Lafite, Latour, Haut-Brion, Mouton and Margaux at anything up to £100 a bottle.
Who buys? "Businessmen," he says. "People from Galway, Limerick, Cork, Waterford, Dublin. A lot are golfers. The better sort of golfers!"
But in parallel with this lofty boxed-claret trade, he has developed its polar opposite, importing wines at the cheapest end of the market both to sell in the pub and by the mixed case (£55). This side of the business also thrives - not least because, although this wine is sold in the pub at £2 a glass, the price for a bottle is just £5. "I tell people if they don't want to finish it they can always take it home with them. Even the local fishermen will often take a bottle of wine home in their pockets now instead of a six-pack."
He is strongly opposed to the 100 per cent mark-up on wine in Irish pubs and restaurants and will soon have another chance to put his margins where his mouth is. Next spring, he will open a bistro and wine vault in a new development in Liscannor - designed by Egan Russell, an architectural practice of which Patrick Egan is a partner. "I'll be working on a 10 per cent margin, or £1 to £1.50 corkage at most," he promises. "I know some restaurants have very high overheads but I still don't believe the mark-up on wine should even be as high as 33 per cent, as is now standard in London - and it certainly shouldn't be 100 per cent."
It will be interesting to see how this hopeful saga unfolds.
Patrick Egan could entertain you half the night with his theories about why the Irish palate might prefer Margaux to Pauillac ("Lynch-Bages and the rest - those are businessmen's wines .
too much fountain-pen ink tannin"), or with stories about how a visitor dressed in scruffy, borrowed oilskins confounded a group of Belgians on a fishing trip by hauling up two bottles of Roederer Cristal from the briny depths.
With his Christmas dinner he will open a bottle of 1981 Trotanoy. "I can't afford Petrus, but this is the next best thing - from the same Moueix stable. It's wonderfully elegant." And though he will doubtless savour its special qualities, he is quick to stress that no bottle, no matter how magnificent, contributes more than about 30 per cent to the overall experience of wine enjoyment. The rest is determined by companions, atmosphere, your state of health and what you are eating, roughly in that order.
"If you're in a bad mood nothing, absolutely nothing, tastes right." Wise words for any whose nerves may incline toward tautness over the next few days.