HOW was your St Patrick's break? Mine wasn't bad either - or so it seemed until I heard how a group of Irish wine lovers drowned the shamrock last year in Bordeaux. Dinner on St Patrick's night was in Chateau Lascombes, awash with this Margaux Second Growth instead of emerald beer. The six-day Searsons' trip also included dinner at Chateau Beychevelle, lunch at Chateau Palmer, visits to Chateaux Petrus, Mouton Rothschild, Lynch-Bages, Leoville-Barton and serious gourmet exercises at some of the best restaurants in Bordeaux. The mere, envious thought of it turns me a seasonal shade of green.
Never mind. The long holiday season stretches ahead and the wine tour business is booming. Never before has it been possible to comb in fondness for the occasional decent bottle with escape to foreign parts in so many interesting ways. You can walk through the wine regions of the world, armed with nothing more than a robust picnic, while your baggage travels ahead of you. You can progress painlessly from top chateau to top chateau by coach, car, bicycle - or even by barge, for heaven's sake! You may spend as little as £199 on a quick April blast in Champagne, or 10 times that on a two-week spree through South Africa's winelands. And, the feeling of well-being that wine imparts is enhanced by the warm afterglow of self-improvement.
"Nobody need worry about being expected to know a great deal," says Monica Murphy of The Cheeseboard Ltd - the Irish wine consultant who led the Bordeaux trip for Searsons and who has been a tour guide for the top British wine tour company, Arblaster & Clarke, for the past four years. "Some people have a huge amount of knowledge, others don't, but we fill in the gaps in a very casual, friendly way. I might give a bit of tasting advice or snippets of background information as we travel along in the coach. The main thing is that the tours are great fun."
This is borne out both by statistics - Arblaster & Clarke have over 50 per cent repeat business - and by Dubliner Maeve Kearns who has gone on three of this firm's tours; to the Loire, to Lake Garda and Piedmont and on a walking tour of the Grands Crus of Burgundy. "I went on my own each time and they were all tremendous fun," she says. "I also learnt an immense amount but there was never anything snobbish or pretentious about it. It was always every friendly, very relaxed." She will definitely go again, she says, maybe to Oregon, land of delicious Pinot Noirs, if and when A&C offer it.
Just about every other wine region you can think of features in the current brochure of the company, set up nine years ago by travel agent Lynette Arblaster and wine merchant Tim Clarke (both of whom have Irish roots). Monica Murphy is either wine guide or tour organiser for trips this year to Rioja, Champagne, Bordeaux and the Loire, Verona for wine with Aida and - most thrilling of all - California for a sunny November week. But there Fare many other possibilities, from Hungary and Truffing in the Loire (both new this year) to a luxury sojourn as private guests of Chateau Lascombes.
This is our most expensive tour - £1,249 for four days - and yet it's also the most popular 0," says Lynette Arblaster. "It sold out within a week, so we arranged a second one and that too sold out immediately. Now we're trying to fix on a third set of dates." Whereas the typical A&C tour group is 20-30 people, this one, for obvious reasons of exclusivity, is limited to 16.
Although Alblaster & Clarke now offers some walking holidays, coach tours form the backbone of their business. The vineyard strolling specialists are Winetrails, another English company with an extensive portfolio of what are described as "gentle walking holidays through the world's most spectacular wine regions everywhere from the Southern Rhone to South Africa, Cahors to California.
Stephen Dallyn, who set this company up three years ago after almost two decades of experience as a walking-holidays organiser, promises the pace is not too punishing - about two miles per hour, and generally from two to five hours' walking per day. Remember this is the actual walking time, not allowing for exploring the hedgerows, talking to,, the cows, lunch stops or tastings, he says. Every so often there are free days when those who have fallen by the wayside can recover while the superfit maintain a healthy thirst, clocking up extra kilometres. In some areas - Tuscany and Rioja, for instance - there is vehicle support, a further reassurance to those of average fitness. The usual group size is about a dozen.
Both Winetrails and Arblaster & Clarke say they will be happy to tailor-make tours for groups of Irish wine lovers, provided the numbers make economic sense. This difficulty is not one the Dublin wine shop Mitchells expects to encounter in the trip to Portugal planned for a week from May 24th. "The group size is strictly limited to 20 and although it is open to all, members of Mitchells Wine Guild get priority," says Emma O'Sullivan, the organiser. "We genuinely expect a lot of interest in this trip which at £795 is superb value for money."
She might be right. The itinerary winds through tastings and feastings in the gardens of Aveleda, the Douro valley, Lisbon and the Setubal peninsula, culminating in a gala dinner at Oporto's famous Factory House - the exclusive club set up in the 1790s for the delectation of leading port shippers. After the meal, served on the original 18th-century china, no less, the Mitchells group will move to an adjoining diningroom to enjoy a vertical tasting of vintage ports, their palates at no risk of confusion from lingering food odours. An irresistibly stylish little touch.
There you have it: the tastebuds tingling for days at a time from exciting new examples of your favourite tipple, and the local food that makes it taste its best scenery on which to feast the eyes, as vineyards seem to thrive in the most attractive places; travelling companions with a common interest. Best of all, somebody else organises the entire shooting match, through personal contact with the sort of names most of us know only from wine labels.