Buying wine is often an exercise in blind trust on a baffling scale. Think about it. If you're not sure whether to buy your jeans from DKNY or Dunnes Stores, you try on both, feel the fabric, strut about analysing comfort and cut.
Make-up or aftershave? You slather on samples. Music or books? You test-listen or browse. But wine can't usually be vetted in advance. You stretch out an arm to any one of the 5,000 or 6,000 bottles currently on offer in Ireland, and there's no way of knowing, until the cork is pulled, whether it's the most thrilling liquid that has ever passed your lips or something pretty close to poison.
Maybe it's corked. Or you just don't like it. Or it's not as good as you remembered - a lesser vintage, perhaps. Any of these minor disasters can strike. But with so many wines on offer from so many sources, there is another possibility - a brutal hazard not often openly discussed in the polite, civilised milieu of the Irish wine trade. You may have been conned. The wine may be rubbish.
The news that a number of Irish buyers lost money with the recent collapse of Croft & Dupont, a London-based company offering ludicrously overpriced Bordeaux as a supposedly low-risk investment, is just one aspect of an ancient and pervasive problem. With all its mystique - and the sheer, practical difficulty of pre-sampling the liquid in the bottle - wine is an ideal substance for scams. Everything from serious fraud, adulteration or flagrant over-pricing down to dubious wine-making techniques, or even just dizzy marketing hype for wines that have no clothes. All of this raises a crucial question. Who is it coming from? There are two layers to the cushion of dependability that protects us as buyers - whether the temptation is a case of 1990 Chateau Le Pin at around £6,000 or a bottle to jolly up this evening's steak at £6.99. Reliable producers and reliable retailers. Sounds obvious, doesn't it? Usually they're tacked together: reputable wine merchants tend to deal with reputable wineries, and vice versa, so their customers have a double-duvet of reassurance. Yet, incredibly, some people are apparently happy to hand over a fat wad of cash for wine - one of the most complex, unpredictable commodities going - to a source they know little or nothing about.
A brief word about buying wine purely for investment. Don't. Even wine obsessives who know off by heart the track record of all the top properties in Bordeaux over the past 20 years tend to invest only in those wines they know they will enjoy drinking, in case aspirations for fat profits go awry. Don't be fooled by plausible looking brochures that arrive in the post, promising wondrous returns. "Why settle for a few per cent interest a year from a bank when you could be making up to 30 per cent a month from French Bordeaux wine!" crows one which landed in my letterbox a while back, from an outfit called Liquid Gold.
"Government-regulated", "fully insured", "bank guaranteed", "tax-free" - all the soothing buzzwords are there. But "could make" and "will make" are oceans apart. That is the bottom line. The only sane way to buy enjoyable wine which may one day turn out to have been a sound investment is from a wine merchant with enough experience of the top level to be able to offer worthwhile advice. We have lots of them - Findlaters, Mitchells, Searsons, Berry Bros, McCabes, Redmonds, Greenacres in Wexford, Dennison Fine Wines in Waterford, the Vineyard in Galway, Pat Egan in Liscannor, Karwigs in Cork, Nicholsons in Crossgar, Direct Wine Shipments in Belfast, to name but a few. A good wine merchant is also an important line of defence against wines at less elevated prices which are equally bad buys - nasty, tasteless things you simply wouldn't want to drink. The proprietor of any decent off-licence should know the wines on the shelves, and know a bit about their producers - because, in today's wine maze, reputable producers are the best bulwark protecting consumers from the dull and the second-rate. Supermarkets tend to offer a more uneven service, with more commercially driven wines, fewer well-informed staff and less direct contact with customers. E-commerce depersonalises the process still further. How will the burgeoning Internet wine companies measure up as dependable sources of decent wines?
The March issue of Wine magazine describes how a team of staff tasters anonymously ordered in a mixed case of wine from three e-companies, ChateauOnline, Enjoyment, and Orgasmic Wines. The selection from the first, they rated poor in quality and very poor value; those from the second generally disappointing. Only the third company apparently delivered on drinkability.
"Wines that have not sold well elsewhere can be flogged to innocent punters fairly easily over the Net," the article concludes. "Although in most cases you can send a case back if you are unsatisfied, how easy is it?"
Until the competition gets hotter, and the quality gets better, stick to the regions, producers and wines that you know, Wine suggests. The producers matter above all else, in my view - and whether we're talking about website wine lists or restaurant wine lists, they're still not mentioned half enough. Name your sources, folks! If they're good, you should be proud of them. Otherwise we'll suspect you of trying to con your customers into thinking they're getting a great wine, when in fact they're being sold a pretty poor example of some grand-sounding appellation. Chablis, Sancerre, Chateauneuf-du-Pape are the restaurant favourites for this sort of treatment. Watch out also on the Web for Irish Internet wine companies proffering what may sound like swanky wines - such as Amarone and Savigny-les-Beaune - without an iota of info about who made them. Always a bad sign.
Faced with all this confusion - unfamiliar names or no names - what is a thirsty consumer to do? Stop worrying about grape varieties for a while, maybe, and start building up in your mind a handy little catalogue of reliable producers. I've written heaps about how many of the most exciting wines come from small estates led by individualists - thousands of them, everywhere. But if you're starting into the memory game, that's too many names to conjure with. Let's look this week instead at some of the big players who turn out dependable everyday wines as well as pulling out the stops for prestige bottlings.