An Irish Diary

Smoke and teroirs – An Irishman’s Diary about peat wine

A sizeable section of the internet, myself included, was googling Irish Peat Wine to learn what exactly it involved

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Frank McNally
Wed Jan 31 2018 - 00:01

The existence of something called “Irish Peat Wine” had somehow passed me by until I saw it mentioned on Twitter earlier this week.

The tweeter was comedian Dara Ó Briain, who himself had just encountered the phenomenon, selling for “40 yoyos a bottle” in Knock Airport. In his incredulity, he resorted to strong language, or strong acronyms anyway. “W-T-utter-F is this?” he asked.

He wasn’t alone in being sceptical about the concept.

One cynic suggested the “t” in peat was silent (okay, that was me).

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But the tweet also set off a bog-fire of bad puns, which is still raging as I write.

Ó Briain has 2.5 million followers: the blaze will probably burn itself out by Christmas.

Even as that took off, however, the man himself was tweeting a follow-up, with a note of apology. The wine-makers had been in touch, he said, “and are lovely people starting a new business”. So now, naturally, he felt like a “monster”.

I know what that’s like too.

Still, he needn’t have beaten himself up about it, because as one of the many responses to his comment pointed out, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

By now, a sizeable section of the internet, myself included, was googling Irish Peat Wine to learn what exactly it involved: pinot noir grapes from the Rhine, it turned out, infused with West Limerick turf. I'll probably have to try it now (although I may wait until the yoyo's exchange rate falls again).

Besides, in reacting as he first did, Ó Briain was just fulfilling his obligations under a kind-of national neighbourhood watch system in which many of us are unpaid volunteers. In this case, the focus is not burglars, or anything so trivial. What we’re looking out for are early-warning signs that the country is losing the run of itself again.

Newspaper letter-writers are among the most active members of the scheme. But according to our archive, the most recent use of the phrase “losing the run of ourselves” in these pages occurred over in the features section just before Christmas.

Interestingly, that too involved alcohol. Under the heading “Whatever happened to the humble gin-and-tonic?”, the writer noted that Irish bars were now adding such things as “mint, thyme, and peppercorn” to the drink, and that there was an accompanying tendency for the result to cost up to a tenner.

Hence the question: “Are we losing the run of ourselves with garnishes and pricing?”

On the face of it, Peat Wine at €40 a bottle might be an even more ominous step towards reflexive run-loss.

But then again, maybe not.

Peat-smoke has long been a feature of whiskey-making, after all. And whatever about wine, I’m told by anyone who has ever cut turf that tea tastes nowhere better than in a bog.

It may also be worth noting that IPW was launched at the Flying Boat Museum in Foynes: the same place a barman once came up with a wheeze called “Irish Coffee”. That was to last a lot longer than flying boats, so who knows? In years to come, peat-infused wine may be one of Ireland’s success stories.

We may even live to see maps of our peat-wine regions and their major labels: Côte de Lullymore, Chateauneuf du Paps, etc.

James Joyce would have been fascinated, no doubt. I'm reminded of a scene from Ulysses, in Barney Kiernan's pub, where he came close to predicting this product. "– Give it a name, citizen, says Joe. -- Wine of the country, says he. -- What's yours? says Joe – Ditto MacAnaspey, says I."

Of course it wasn’t actual wine they were drinking: “Three pints, Terry” was Joe’s summary. And nobody did give it a name, or need to, because the vin de pays here was Guinness.

As for the mysterious “Ditto MacAnaspey”, that sounds like a brand of craft beer now. But it was an unusual expression even in 1904, according to scholars. It clearly meant “same here”, although it doesn’t seem to have been used anywhere outside the Joyce household and is assumed to be a family catchphrase inherited from their father.

McAnaspies were a firm of Dublin stucco plasterers. So a plausible theory for the expression’s origin was an auction once involving two busts of the same subject.

McAnaspie’s was sold second, thereby becoming drinkers’ short-hand for “same again”.

Any reference to a popular Dublin activity that implies a combination of stucco-work and alcohol – ie getting plastered - was probably unintended, although you never know with Joyce.

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