7.45 p.m.
Tuesday evening at L'Ecrivain, Derry Clarke's recently reopened restaurant on Baggot Street, in Dublin. Seats are filling up in the new area for aperitifs; glasses of wine sprouting on the baby grand that functions as a table. The private dining-room is bustling, the main restaurant beginning to hum. Before you see her at all, you hear the purposeful clip-clop of her heels on the limestone floor; then there's a glimpse of cascading, corkscrew curls as she pounds upstairs armed with bottles. Martina Delaney is doing her thing.
An ordinary weeknight in L'Ecrivain - bigger and even busier than before, since its elegant refurbishment - but this is not your stereotypical smart-restaurant sommelier. For one thing, she's female. For another, she doesn't have a French accent - nor even a "Rothgor" drawl. The eldest in a Finglas family of four, Martina originally thought of tailoring as a career. "Until I worked in a clothing factory as a kid and absolutely hated it. I realised I'm a people person."
So we can forget that other stereotype of the aloof, snooty wine waiter - a species which, although in decline, is not yet extinct. "Martina is really bubbly and she's always, always in good form," says a regular customer who has made serious inroads into L'Ecrivain's fine wine hoard. "She's also extremely knowledgeable about her wines."
"I've even got my dad into wine now - and he's been a Guinness drinker all his life," Martina says, with the grin of enthusiasm that recurs every time she hears a customer has enjoyed one of her recommendations. "And the neighbours are always asking me what wines to buy. I used to go in and find big bottles of Liebfraumilch and Pedrotti in their fridges, and I'd say: `Jesus, what on earth are you drinking?' Now they're on to quite good Australian wines, and I've got them trying some from Portugal and Greece as well."
The career path (in case you're wondering what happened when the tailoring ambitions evaporated) was: CERT course; Cathal Brugha Street basic hospitality course; restaurant work in Stokers, Dobbins, a Greek/Cypriot place in Sydney ("the money was great, and so was the sunshine"), then The Old Dublin. By the time she arrived in L'Ecrivain in 1994, Martina Delaney had been bitten by the wine bug. With encouragement from Ray Hingston, the restaurant's sommelier at the time, she signed up for classes with the Wine Development Board.
"That's been more or less it, apart from a brief period when I went to work for a wine importer," she says. "I've been here as long as the furniture." Then, glancing around at the revamped interior: "What am I saying? Much longer than the furniture!"
9.30 p.m.
Six tables are drinking Regnard Chablis Premier Cru Fourchaume, the best-seller of the night, at £34 a bottle. "We have an awful lot of customers who automatically just order Chablis." A solicitor with a serious Burgundy addiction is branching out, however - testing our wine dynamo's ardent endorsement of the Sauvignon-based Torres white, Fransola. And Barry Desmond is beaming over a bottle of Marques de Vargas Rioja Reserva.
Martina is still striding about like a small sergeant major demonstrating the meaning of quick march, even though it's been a long day with split shifts - 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. until close. Tuesday is delivery day, so the first task is to sort and stash the new arrivals, check whether vintages need to be changed on the list and make sure there's plenty of stock to slake the thirst of big parties booked in for the rest of the week. Lunch service is always pressurised: most customers have only an hour to spare. When all is cleared away and setting up for the evening completed, there's usually time for "a cup of coffee with an aunt in Ringsend, if I don't have time to go home". Then five hours of the dinner routine.
Sometimes extra commitments crop up - like this afternoon's wine tasting, laid on by an importer hoping for business. "We're always trying to improve the list," Martina says, explaining that she and sommelier Guillaume Rhein collaborate closely on new acquisitions. "We've updated the Portuguese section - I'm just back from my first wine trip to Portugal and it was brilliant. We also have much better Burgundy than before. Red Burgundy is so versatile. It'll go with meat or fish and it won't weigh you down. It's great at lunchtime."
10 p.m.
A table of four up on the high-level mezzanine has proceeded from Chablis Premier Cru to port, and from port to champagne - Krug 1989, no less (£195). On Monday night, it was the order for a bottle of Chateau Lynch-Bages 1988 (£180) that gave Martina a thrill. "When a customer orders something really special you get a great kick out of it - of course you do. Quite often there'll be a bit left in the bottle, so we get to taste it, which is great. A party of 10 once left us an amazing amount of Cheval Blanc!" She has passed the tasting section of the Wine Diploma - partly, she suggests, because the Meursault in the blind tasting had come her way in L'Ecrivain the week before. Not much prospect of any Krug this evening, though. All gone. The quartet has moved on to Redbreast.
11.15 p.m.
With only a few tables still occupied, Martina should be finished by midnight. Although the restaurant has been almost full, with 98 customers, it's been a pretty calm evening. Not like the evening, a year or two ago, when the esteemed English wine writer Hugh Johnson came to dine, and there were panic phone-calls to Dobbins, Terroirs and Redmonds to try to find the bottles he wanted. "We're just getting that from the cellar, we told him," Martina chuckles. "We didn't tell him whose."
If she were here as a paying customer, what wines would she choose? "Probably the Domaine Emilian Gillet MaconVire for the white, because it's so different - really fruity and luscious for a Burgundy. The red would depend on what I was eating. For light food, the Givry from Joblot or the Marc Bredif Chinon. For richer food, the Duas Quintas Reserva." I can't argue with that: all four have featured in this column. In case you're tempted to stock up, the Macon-Vire is available from Wines Direct (£14.75); the Joblot Givry from Burgundy Direct (£11.95); the Bredif Chinon from selected wine merchants through Morgans (about £12.99) and the Duas Quintas Reserva from Searsons (£16.75).
Soon, Martina is chatting away about her house wines. Next, with a conversational swerve, she's unveiling plans to get customers all revved up about sherry. Suddenly she pauses. A moment of reflection. "The thing about wine is that there's a lot of snobbery attached to it . . . but . . . I don't really have that."