How the best cellars can be found online

‘This website is crammed with information’

Given the times that are in it, I’m hoping to focus on our best online wine merchants over the next few weeks. We are indeed blessed with some very impressive operators on this island and today I want to have a quick – far too quick and too short – look at Pascal and Geraldine Rossignol’s Le Caveau in the heart of the medieval centre of Kilkenny.

I was in that city just a few weeks ago and lunched well at Rinuccini, the delightfully old-fashioned Italian near the castle, before wandering over to Market Yard to browse the shelves at Le Caveau. But, being a Monday, it was closed and I made do with having a leisurely look online at lecaveau.ie.

This may lack the personal touch – there’s no substitute for actual bottles and actual people – but this website is crammed with information. It also underlines very effectively how the Rossignols deal almost exclusively with small, fiercely independent, sometimes curmudgeonly producers who are utterly devoted to doing it in their own, distinctive ways. This is the antithesis of mass-produced wines designed to please the crowd. This is where you can find real character.

Le Caveau’s wines are to be found in many other top retailers, such as Green Man Wines in Terenure, The Corkscrew in central Dublin and 64 Wines in Glasthule, to name but a few. And, as Pascal is the country’s leading “natural” wine specialist, you will find many of his examples of minimal intervention production available by the glass at Loose Cannon on Drury Street, Dublin.

I am not so much a natural wines sceptic as an agnostic. I have had superb, indifferent and downright awful wines made in various “natural” ways and Le Caveau have the best. I’d pull out Gran Cerdo from Spain, a terrific, meaty red for €13.95, and the lush Fillipi Castelcerino, the best Soave I’ve ever tasted, for €20.25, if I had to suggest two affordable examples.