‘I cook with wine; sometimes I even add it to the food.’
— W.C. Fields
St. Patrick’s Day is a big deal in my house. My wife’s ancestors (the Boyles) are from County Tyrone and I once had a man in Northern Ireland, straight out of central casting, tell me that all the Boyds in Scotland came from Ireland.
So for six years, we’ve hosted a big St. Patrick’s Day dinner, complete with home-made soda bread, corned beef and cabbage, boiled potatoes and carrots, copious amounts of Guinness Stout and red wine. We’d tried different reds in the past; some worked and some didn’t, so this year the idea was to load up the table with wines from wineries bearing an Irish surname. Bordeaux has its Wild Geese group of about 14 chateaux with Irish names from the original owners and California has Concannon, Murphy-Goode, Mayo, Fitzgerald and more.
One guest brought a Murphy-Goode wine with Goode blacked out on the label (Is Goode an Irish name?), but the hit of the evening were two 40-year-old reds from Concannon Vineyard. Concannon, Livermore Valley Petite Sirah 1965, was in amazingly good shape, with plenty of ripe, slightly jammy fruit, excellent acidity and soft but substantial tannins. The Limited Bottling was bottled in February 1969, at 12% alcohol. And the bottle still carried the price sticker of $2.75. Concannon, Livermore Valley Cabernet Sauvignon 1962, was definitely a senior citizen. The color was brick-red and the faint nose showed leafy notes with tobacco undertones. There was some fruit in this middle-aged Cabernet, but it was fading fast. Nice wine but it didn’t show near as well as the Petite Sirah.
Point is two-fold: Don’t forget those bottles of aged reds hiding in the back of your closet or cellar and be adventurous and experimental. Stout may be a great choice for the traditional Irish meal (and it was), but there is a wine for just about any meal. Hopefully you’ll be lucky enough to have two friends who raid their cellars for just the right wine (with an Irish surname) to marry nicely with a juicy slab of corned beef. Slainte!
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