I BET you've been going steady with Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon for years. You may also be in a meaningful relationship with Merlot, or feel prepared to swear perpetual devotion to Syrah or Sauvignon Blanc. They're sorts we'd all be inclined to settle down with. But with summer escape on the blue horizon, isn't it time for a little drop of holiday romance? A fleeting fling with a stranger?
I blame Paul Dempsey of Jus de Vine in Portmarnock - the protagonist of unusual wines interviewed in last week's column - for sending me off this week on a Shirley Valentine quest for alluring exotica. There's plenty of it out there on the wine shelves, sprinkled among the more familiar stalwarts, and I must say it's a treat to savour different flavours for a change.
There are, of course, hundreds of wines on the Irish market whose distinctive personality depends on a blend of grapes - some well known, some less so. Intriguing and delectable they may be, but they have no place in my current thirst for novelty. I'm focusing on unusual varietals - wines made from a single variety of grape - partly as a means of determining the special characteristics of grapes it's sometimes easy to forget.
Fifteen to 20 years ago the whole concept of varietal wines was as fresh and strange as the notion that humble wage earners might one day slip into the habit of opening a bottle or two in the middle of the week. Australia was the first country to simplify our drinking, labelling bottles by the name of the grapes from which they were chiefly made Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz and so on. So eagerly was this basic stratagem lapped up by consumers that in no time the rest of the New World had adopted it - eventually dragging large chunks of the Old World in behind. There can hardly be a wineproducing country in the world now without a rake of straight Chardonnays to its name.
The trouble is that boredom is setting in. The more we drink and learn to recognise the tastes of familiar, popular grapes, the more we're beginning to look for variety in our varietals. And we drinkers aren't the only ones to hanker after new experiences.
It's some time now since California's Rhone Rangers went into a frenzy of excitement planting vines from the south of France. Now they're having a go at Italian grape varieties - and individualistic wine makers everywhere else are following the same path away from the obvious. Curious old native grapes which five years ago might have been ripped up as too esoteric have been saved and cherished alongside new plantings of bizarre foreigners.
The result? Oddities such as Vermentino and Primitivo in the supermarket, along with more Semillons, Rieslings and Gewurztraminers. Malbec and Terret and Tannat, as well as a swelling selection of crowd pulling Tempranillo. I hope you'll give them a whirl, some time when tedium threatens, as well as dabbling in the list of goodies below.