Sorry, folks, but this week's column is dedicated to purity, clean living, corporal spring cleaning. With new-year fitness campaigns in full swing and maybe the ghost of lenten abstinence looming on the near horizon, we're turning from wine to water. The bottled stuff, still or sparkling, mineral or spring, versus ordinary H20 out of the tap.
Despite a trend I've noticed at dinner parties these past few years, whereby handsome big jugs of tap water are served up with ice, lemon and muttered scepticism about the bottled equivalent not being worth the fuss, the Republic is gulping down branded water at a fierce rate. According to industry sources, the market grew by 25 per cent in 1997 and 18 per cent 1998 - not bad for people who barely knew bottled water existed just 20 years ago. We're currently drinking about 55 million litres a year in total - 16 litres a head, which makes our per capita consumption about double that for wine.
The two go together, of course. We've come to expect companion bottles, not just in France or Italy but on any half-respectable Irish restaurant's tables. Most serious wine drinkers realise the only way to indulge their passion and survive is to match the quantity they consume with the same amount of water, glass for glass. Sommeliers apparently consider sparkling water appropriate as an aperitif to perk up the palate, and still water preferable during a meal, because bubbles interfere with the subtle flavours of wine or food. The reality, I suspect, is that the water world is divided into fans of flat and fans of fizzy. In the early 1990s in Ireland, we lapped up almost twice as much sparkling water as still - perhaps because it was different from what we were used to. A bit more bracing. A teeny bit more interesting. Now the ratio is reversed - partly because those ridged plastic bottles of still mineral water have become a style statement, reinforced by supermodels, pop videos and sports stars. The youth market is huge. As Karen Coyle, marketing manager for Ballygowan, says: "Mineral water is a fashion accessory. It's a way of saying: I have moved on from soft drinks."
The distinction between still and sparkling is simple enough. Bubbles or no bubbles. (These, by the way, may remain in the water as it comes out of the ground, as is the case with some gently fizzy Italian and French waters. They may be introduced through artificial carbonation. Or the carbon gas naturally present may be removed as the water emerges from underground and reintroduced in precisely the same ratio - as happens, for instance, with Perrier. So much for carefree bubbles . . .)
Much more baffling is water's qualitative jargon. In approximate terms, "natural mineral water" is an aqueous grand cru - a water that comes from a single underground source and has nothing added to it (except possibly carbon dioxide for fizz). "Spring water" is also "pure" water, but it may be blended from a number of sources and chemically tweaked a little. Anything more nebulous than these two types ("table water", for instance) isn't worth bothering about. But, confusingly, some manufacturers label their natural mineral water as spring water. Currently, irrespective of how they may describe themselves, five Irish waters have natural mineral water status: Ballygowan, Tipperary, Glenpatrick, River Rock and Kerry Spring.
What about the taste? Let's leave aside the tidal wave of new fruit-flavoured mineral and spring waters, which I don't believe true wine and food freaks will have much truck with, and consider bottled waters in their conventional state. I've been putting a wide selection of leading brands, Irish, French and Italian, to the test, with the help of other noses and palates much more finely tuned than mine. Martin Moran, a Master of Wine with Gilbeys, Ben Mason of Searsons, Maureen O'Hara of Findlaters and Mary O'Callaghan, wine lecturer, consultant to the Cheers Take-Home group and a representative of the Irish Guild of Sommeliers at many tasting competitions abroad, spent the healthiest Sunday morning of their lives recently blind-tasting eight still and nine sparkling waters. Those in large bottles with an unidentifiable shape were sheathed in foil to hide their identity. The remainder were decanted into jugs or carafes. Not until all the deliberations were over and votes for the favourites cast were the mystery brand names divulged. The first, and probably the biggest, revelation was how disgusting the control sample of tap water appeared to be against which we compared all the bottled waters. There it was, the Dublin mains supply that I've swigged happily for years, coming over all chlorine-laden and dank. So there's something to the purity premise after all. But comparing the mineral and spring waters with each other was much more challenging. If you think that tasting wine blind can be tricky (and I certainly do), you want to try water for flavour nuances that were occasionally unpleasant but mostly just maddeningly subtle. As a group, the still waters provoked the least debate and the safest of descriptors - "soft", "bland", "clean" and the like. The sparklers were much more varied. "Chalky, very minerally!" one taster would read out from their notes for a particular sample. "Revolting - tasting of plastic," said a second. "No, I liked those zesty, definite flavours that make it almost Alka Seltzer-like," piped up a third. Often, even a watered down consensus was impossible. No bad thing, perhaps: as with wine, divergent opinions merely underline the fact that people have widely differing tastes, and the only thing each one of us really needs to discover is what we like.
Even so, there were some clear favourites, as you'll see from the list below. Value for money may be another factor to consider, with prices ranging from 40 pence a litre to almost three times that amount. Our panel also felt that, given the fact there was often little to pick and choose between the waters in terms of flavour or texture, the appearance of the bottle might be worthy of separate consideration. Some look fine at the gym but not great on the table. Some look downright tacky. Others look stylish enough to slip effortlessly into the smartest table setting.
One last thought. We may be drinking more water, but we're probably still not drinking enough. Six pints a day is the average amount the poor body loses each day - and you don't have to be a scientific genius to realise that has to be replaced to keep the system functioning smoothly. Galileo, bless him, is reputed to have said that wine is merely water held together by sunshine. Back to that sort next week.