Delayed gratification is sometimes a wise move
A death, a possible murder and a tangled web of secrets set the scene in a new RTÉ drama about a contemporary Irish family
Idon’t know what proportion of wine is bought for ageing these days, but I’d imagine it’s minuscule. Virtually everything is made for immediate drinking or certainly within three years. Look at the supermarket shelves right now and most bottles bear the vintages 2018 and 2019.
This is all fine and dandy as most wine just about makes it home with the shopping before being dispatched. I remember my late mother in law’s response when her aristocratic and titled neighbour wondered how long Beaujolais nouveau lasts. ‘About 10 minutes around here...’
The noble lord would have had a fine cellar, of course, but only in the sense of a place with the right temperature and humidity to store wine in optimum conditions. However, like most owners of big houses, I suspect he bought his wine in Quinnsworth (it’s a long time ago) or had some pretty basic stuff delivered by Mitchell’s. The stranded gentry have always been parsimonious on the wine front.
Anyway, it can be fun, if you have the self-restraint, to buy modest enough wines right now and keep them a while. In some cases, even a year or 18 months will see interesting and sometimes very tasty changes.
Tannins in red wines soften, the aromas become more interesting. And some whites will really open up and become much more layered than they are in infancy.
The pro and the con of what I’m going to suggest is that cheaper wines that are worth keeping are also quite pleasant to drink right now.
Hence the need for iron self-restraint.
Certain things are needful. You must have a dark place with a pretty constant temperature (the ideal cellar is between 10ºC and 15ºC but wine will be OK up to 20ºC provided it doesn’t vary much). You need to avoid vibration and strong smells like diesel or soap.
Lay the bottles on their sides so the wine keeps the corks moist and fat.
Very gradual oxidation is what makes the ageing process in wine so interesting but air, as such, is very much the enemy of wine if there’s prolonged contact. Sniff a glass of wine left overnight and you will know this is true.
Anyway, here are five candidates. Give them a year, give them five if you can. OK, I suppose even a few months will help, but you get the gist.
Here’s to delayed gratification!
When Val Ahern’s husband Denis is found dead at a foot of a cliff close to their home the morning after a family party, she begins to interrogate his relationships with his family — and uncovers an intricate web of lies.
Smother is a new six-part Irish drama commissioned by RTÉ and filmed on location around Co Clare. The series stars Dervla Kirwan as Val, a devoted mother who is determined to protect her family and particularly her three daughters, Jenny, Anna and Grace, at any cost.
Jenny (played by Niamh Walsh) is a heavily pregnant single doctor, unsure of the choices she has made.
Seána Kerslake, of Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope fame, plays Grace, an angry but fragile young woman struggling with mental health issues. Anna is a devoted stepmother to two teenage boys whose birth mother has recently reappeared on the scene and is played by Gemma-Leah Devereux (Judy, The Tudors).
After Denis’s body is found, Val begins to question the truth behind his relationships with his nearest and dearest to find out who might have been responsible for his brutal, shocking death. But the deeper she delves into her family’s secrets the more she realises how her late husband’s manipulative behaviour had a deep effect on each member of the family and those they love.
Kirwan said she couldn’t wait to get her teeth into the role of Val in Smother, which was written by Kate O’Riordan.
‘In Smother Kate O’Riordan has created a riveting thriller that will wake the world up to contemporary Ireland and rewrite an outdated narrative that has been peddled about the Irish for years,’ Dervla says.
‘Val is such a complex, layered character and a ferociously protective mother and I’m really excited to be playing her in such a powerful Irish drama. Smother has so much to say about modern families, and it says it in a compelling and gripping way.”
Smother begins on RTÉ One tonight at 9:30pm