In 1866, Valentia Island in Co Kerry made history with the opening of the first transatlantic phone cable from there to Hearts Content in Newfoundland, transforming international communications. Next month, another piece of history will be made when Valentia Island Vermouth, Ireland’s first vermouth, crosses the Atlantic to Boston, New York and Washington to launch its bottled magic in America.
Vermouth is a fortified wine flavoured with botanicals, herbs and spices, primarily made in Italy and Spain. Familiar brands include Noilly Prat and Cinzano. The distinctive aspect and golden colour of the Irish Vermouth Ór (Irish for gold) comes from gorse, part of some 20 botanicals locally foraged on Valentia Island, and some from elsewhere that include wormwood, nutmeg and yarrow. Since launching in 2021, it has won Blás na hÉireann’s bronze and gold awards, as well as Best Artisan Producer in Ireland. Sales continue to soar.
The pioneering founders are a married couple, Anna and Orla O’Carroll. We meet at their home, a cosy whitewashed cottage not far from Knightstown on Valentia, which they share with their cockapoo Nanuk and a languid tabby called Queenie. Their welcome is warm, and their gaiety infectious.
Orla, who is from Greystones in Co Wicklow, originally studied fashion at Bray IFE, and spent a few years in Australia before deciding to do an MA in art, media and design at the University of West England in Bristol. Anna, who moved to live in Bristol at the age of 18, had a similar background in fashion, having worked for Burberry on its fashion shows in Hyde Park, and for the theatre company Punchdrunk. She was studying sculpture, and from there moved into stage and theatre design.
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“I joined Orla’s year,” recalls Anna with a grin, “and the craic was mighty.” Orla remembers seeing Anna’s metal sculptures of dystopian bodies and immediately connected with her. After graduation in 2014, they decided to start an immersive food and theatre company in Bristol in a multi-storey car park which, despite attracting enthusiastic audiences and interest from corporates for Christmas parties, “was great fun, but not financially viable”.
They moved to Valentia because of Orla’s longstanding connections to Kerry through her father Anton, a geography teacher originally from a dairy farm in north Kerry. Family summer holidays were always spent in Glenbeigh.
The couple bought a cottage on the island as a bolthole in 2016, and in the summer of 2018, they were the first couple to marry at Valentia Lighthouse, which has since become a popular wedding destination. Anna, who had experience working in high-end restaurants and bars in Bristol, got a job in the Royal Valentia hotel, while Orla worked remotely for a not-for-profit company.
Meanwhile, they had started to experiment with making vermouths, as Anna had learned about cocktails from her bar work, and after a vermouth-tasting with wine expert and vermouth queen Kate Hawkings, had fallen for the drink. “I was drinking this incredible stuff and decided that we had to make it,” she says.
Their experiments continued throughout Covid, using local plants and herbs including gorse (known traditionally in Ireland as furze or whin) which, when dried and added to raw alcohol, developed a rich golden colour.
“My father kept bees in Wicklow,” Orla says. “I remember being with him and learning about plants and flowers that attract bees – that plant knowledge came back to me. He advised on the best time to gather gorse and heathers, so we dried the gorse in jam jars and noticed how the different flavours developed. There were so many bottles on that shelf – it was like a science lab. We learned from our research that Irish people used to make gorse wine, and it is still made in east Cork.”
At Christmas in 2019, a friend from Bristol came to stay and, having tried some of their samples, declared that one of them “was really good”. So they sent a sample to Kate Hawkings, who gave it her imprimatur, later naming it as one of the top 10 vermouths in the world in the gourmet Falstaff magazine. Their copy of her book Aperitif is inscribed with the words, “To the naughtiest girls in the world...”
[ The mermaids putting Valentia Island on the map for vermouthOpens in new window ]
The next step was a Start Your Own Business course in James Burke’s Food Academy, run by SuperValu, Bord Bia and Local Enterprise Offices. “We learnt about HACCP plan [for safe food], bar codes, margins,” says Anna. Their bottles – the robust shape is deliberately unlike a wine bottle – feature graphics by the Dublin-based Scottish illustrator and printmaker Steve Doogan. He describes the imagery as “reflecting the wildness and romance of the island and the couple themselves”. Details of the botanicals, the lighthouse and the mermaids are picked out with gold blocking.
The first bottles went to shelf in June 2021 in nine Supervalu stores, and its success has continued apace. By the end of last year, the product was stocked in 150 Supervalus and independents including O’Brien’s, and served in several Michelin star restaurants. It is also sold in Dublin, Shannon, Cork and Kerry duty frees, in Avoca and Brown Thomas.
Though their precise formula is a closely guarded secret, the main ingredients, apart from the gorse, are wormwood, nutmeg and yarrow, a handmade caramel giving it a burnt taste. The wine is a verdejo organic wine from the Rueda valley in Spain. “[Our vermouth] is different to Noilly Prat or Campari, and is very versatile, so it can be sipped on its own with a tonic or with prosecco as a spritz, and for making classic cocktails like a Negroni or Martini,” Anna says. Everything is made in their “vermoutherie” in Cahirciveen, “where we have big vessels steeping botanicals, and where we make the caramel”.
They are already experimenting with a red and a white vermouth, which they are calling Rua and Bán to follow Ór, and doing trials with local seaweeds. Next month they will be taking their product to Boston, New York and Washington in a major export milestone for the brand.
They continue to promote the vermouth – and the island – filming a video series for social media called Cocktails in the Cottage with photographer Joleen Cronin at the Lighthouse. “We always say that the island is the biggest character in this story. And we constantly thank our art background, because everything we do comes from an art point of view first off,” Orla says.
[ Vermouth back in vogue – and not just for cocktailsOpens in new window ]
Its success has enriched their lives. “It brings us everywhere, and living on the edge of Europe, we feel very connected and our life has become very busy. The vermouth “has become a lovely vehicle – you make something in your house that goes all over the world and people get to enjoy something that we love and that we want to share with others and their friends. It’s an ode to the island.”
