Fields close to the river Dee in Co Louth are not where you would expect to find a vineyard and winery , but that is what Frenchman Bernard Lacile has grown and built over the last five years.
Lacile proudly showed The Irish Times around one of his two vineyards as his springer spaniel dog, Whiskey, bounded through the fields of vines.
Wearing a blue denim Fairy Trees Wines shirt and a Buffalo Bills baseball cap, Lacile outlined how the grapes will be hand-harvested in mid-September.
Back in the winery, Whiskey was joined by Elvis, a white terrier-type dog, as Lacile showed off his grape presses. In the fermentation room were four vats that hold 5,000 litres each, or 7,500 bottles of wine, before the liquid is shipped to France for bottling.
Since its foundation in 2021, Fairy Trees Wines has quickly established its brand by winning awards and getting stocked by well-known off-licences, including the duty-free shop at Dublin Airport. Lacile’s Bán and Dearg white and red wines retail for €12.50 for those flying outside the European Union and have become a popular novelty buy for tourists.
Lacile said that before his winery, Irish wine was “bad” and expensive. He said some Irish wineries were charging up to €80 a bottle.
However, other Irish vineyards have been questioning how Irish his wine is, given the difficulties of growing wine-producing grapes in the Irish climate. Some off-licences describe Lacile’s product as “Irish wine” while his labels say it is “produced in Ireland”.
Lacile said he felt he was in a courtroom when asked to explain the amount of Irish grapes in his wines. He said it was 75 per cent Irish with 25 per cent coming from France. He claims the wine he will produce next year will be “100 per cent” Irish.
He conceded he may have made a “mistake” in not providing more information on the company website or on wine labels about the source of the blended wine that he sells.
The latest version of the Fairy Trees website said “our wines are crafted and produced in Ireland” and that it “also works with “carefully selected fruit”. Nowhere on the site does it outline that some of the wine is French and this has led to several producers online questioning the accuracy of the brand’s labelling.
Lacile said it would be a shame if his winery had to strip out its vines because of negative publicity and said that would undermine the chances of Ireland creating a wine industry.
“If we don’t show anybody that in fact an Irish winery can be successful, nobody – I mean, nobody – will say, ‘Well, yeah, let’s plant some grapes in Ireland. Let’s try’. Because so far it was a failure, pure failure. And Dublin Airport, why did it not take Irish wine before? Because what was tried before was bad.”
He put the winery up for sale in late May because of what he said was a campaign against him that included complaints to Louth County Council and the Health Service Executive. Lacile questioned if he was being targeted because he was French.
He claimed he has been defamed by those who campaigned against him online and those who made complaints to the authorities. He is planning to take legal action.
He wanted to sell the winery because he was “sick” of the complaints.
“I can’t take it any more,” he said. “It just seems like it’s permanent. When is it going to stop? We’re only trying to do something. Maybe sometimes you don’t do it right. I don’t even do that for the money. I don’t get any f***ing salary. I invested more than €1 million…