Summary
The article is a compact St Patrick's Day wine recommendation piece built around three wines united by Irish connection rather than shared style or geography. The centrepiece is the Lusca Vineyard Rondo 2021 from Lusk, Co Dublin — made by David Llewellyn, who has 20 vintages of experience and runs winemaking as a side enterprise to apple growing. His Rondo, a fungus-resistant PIWI hybrid (Pilzwiderstandsfähige Rebsorten) grown outdoors, won Gold at the PIWI International Wine Awards 2024 and retails at €60. The article defends the price with appeals to rarity and national significance rather than comparative market value. A brief sidebar correctly situates Rondo alongside Solaris, Souvignier Gris and Cabernet Cortis as PIWI varieties — the piece's only technically substantive passage.
The second wine, Château Puynard The Steps 2020 from Côtes de Blaye, is a Merlot-Cabernet blend made by Irish couple Andrew Eakin and Naomi Murtagh. Its Irish credentials amount to the owners' nationality. The third, Domaine la Sarabande Misterioso 2020 from Faugères AOP, is an organic Grenache-Syrah blend by Irishwoman Isla Gordon and her Australian husband, on promotion at €12.71. The piece functions as a curated buying list dressed in light narrative, with tasting notes that read as promotional blurbs rather than critical assessments.
Our take
Strip away the shamrock bunting and what remains is a buying guide that mistakes nationality for a quality argument. The €60 Lusca Rondo is presented as self-evidently justified by its Irishness and its gold medal — but a gold at a niche PIWI competition proves genre fitness, not world-class standing. The article never asks whether slow ripening in north Dublin actually outperforms a well-made English Rondo at half the price. Dermot Sugrue's endorsement is deployed like a papal blessing and goes entirely unchallenged. The other two wines are Irish only by owner biography. A passport is not a terroir.
About the author
Aoife Carrigy is the wine and drinks columnist for the Irish Independent's Weekend Magazine. She has won Irish Food Writing Awards for wine writing in 2021, drinks writing in 2022, food writing in 2023, The Irish Times and a further Food Writing Award in 2024 — a formidable record. She is deeply embedded in the Irish hospitality and food industry ecosystem, which is precisely the conflict of interest this warm, unchallenging piece quietly illustrates.
About the publisher
The Irish Independent is Ireland's highest-circulation daily newspaper, rated Right-Center and Mostly Factual by media monitors. Revenue drawn from advertising and subscriptions predictably softens lifestyle coverage. Wine columns function here as reader service and advertiser-adjacent content. Adversarial criticism of a €60 domestic bottle is simply not what the Weekend Magazine is engineered to deliver.