Some years ago I met a swaggering American - the president of a major US drinks corporation - who boasted that the only wine he bought, indeed the only wine worth drinking, was Domaine de La Romanee Conti La Tache. I remember being simultaneously appalled and intrigued. The crass arrogance, the flashy extravagance, of filling cellar and stomach only with the world's most celebrated red wine. And yet . . . what was it like, this Burgundian legend, selling at hundreds of pounds a bottle? Where would I ever get to taste it - and would the Earth move?
Sligo and yes are the answers. Michael Gramsch, proprietor of Octavius Fine Wines in Grattan Street, gets a significant allocation of the Domaine de la RomaneeConti wines from London importers Corney & Barrow. He also sells Domaine Leflaive, another gold-chip Burgundy estate whose wines brought aficionados from all over the country to a grand tasting dinner in Markree Castle before Christmas. Pretty good going for a chap whose shop opened barely three years ago - and who settled in Ireland just three years before that.
Was he steeped in the wine trade somewhere else? No. Gramsch was a policeman at home in Germany for years; then a security specialist for nuclear plants, embassies and banks. Even in black tie and brocade waistcoat, dispensing the nectar of the DRC (I can almost forgive the American, having sipped the ethereal La Tache 1991), he looks like a policeman. "But I grew up with wine, in the Pfalz," he explains. "A lot of my schoolfriends are winemakers now." Imagine the benefits. Not only has Octavius an impressive selection of German wines - a category much misunderstood - but some of the top sellers (such as our Bottle of the Week) have been made to Gramsch's specifications. Germany is only one facet, however, of an eclectic range. "I want to be different," he stresses. "I want to offer people good, well-priced wines which aren't on every supermarket shelf." And so he does. Spain, Portugal, Italy, France and various chunks of the New World are represented in wines which Gramsch has sourced the hard way. Some you'll find only in Octavius; others he sells to a few other shops.
These discoveries for everyday drinking sit side by side with an extensive array of fine wines, as you might guess from biggies such as DRC and Leflaive. Michael Gramsch married his Donegal sweetheart Kay and sniffed out a retail niche when he discovered an unsuspected talent for wine broking. "I've a very good memory," he says. "If I hear that somebody is looking for a particular wine and later I come across somebody who has too much of it, I'll put the two together. It's got to the stage now where we're selling some top French wines back to France, and some top Italian cult wines back to Italy." In the dealing process, he picks up all sorts of lots which make the back left-hand corner of Octavius a lucky dip alive with promise. Great names become affordable in lesser vintages - so customers snap up the likes of Grand-Puy-Lacoste 1992 at around £20; Beauregard 1994 at about £30. But they seize on the good years, too. Serious French wines have a lot of supporters among the professional classes of the northwest. Sligo solicitors and Donegal doctors order gallons of classed growths, as if they still cost the same as in the 1960s. There's liquidity for you.
NOW, a word about a fairly new wine shop up in Letterkenny. Keep your eyes peeled half way along Pearse Road and you'll see De Vine Wines (no relation of the DeVine Wine Shop in Castleknock). A modest front and an uncomfortable name mask an enterprise run with real enthusiasm and flair. "We just love drinking wine," says Catherine Cooke Harkin, who combines a teaching career and motherhood with running the shop in partnership with her teacher husband Oisin Harkin and two friends. "We go to a different wine region of France every year - Bordeaux, the Loire, the Jura and this year Alsace."
Fair enough: but why take the plunge into selling the stuff - especially when they have no interest in importing it themselves? "Not money, definitely!" she says. "Madness!" he says. There was a ready market, they reckoned - those doctors and solicitors again, plus all the civil servants recently transplanted to Letterkenny. "We knew there were a lot of professional people here who are keen wine drinkers," Catherine explains. "Our first customers were all friends." Starting with Searsons - one of the most dynamic wine portfolios in the country - and gradually drawing on another halfdozen importers, they've lined their shelves with a tempting assortment in less than a year. A whole wall of French wine is balanced by bottles from just about everywhere else. "Some of our customers won't touch French wine and some won't touch anything else." One crucial thing to remember, if you're thinking of dropping in: on weekdays, De Vine Wines doesn't open until mid-afternoon - after the teachers have escaped from school.
Octavius, Grattan Street, Sligo, tel/fax 071 71730. Open Monday-Saturday, 10.30 a.m.-7 p.m; late opening Friday until 8 p.m. De Vine Wines, Pearse Road, Letterkenny, tel/fax 074 20444. Open Monday-Friday 4 p.m.10 p.m; Saturday noon10 p.m.
Octavius: octaviusfinewines@oceanfree.net; to find out whether a particular wine is stocked, check out www.winesearch.com