For an indecently long time, Ireland has been in the grip of a passionate affair with Chablis.
It's been one of those say-but-he-word, no-expense-spared liaisons - the illogical sort that make your head spin. Special night out? Chablis, darling. Swish dinner in? Let's just knock a few socks off and cosy things along with Ch . . . Heavens, no, not Chardonnay, which would be shockingly unstylish. Chablis. It may be made from the Chardonnay grape, but that's never mentioned. It's separate, different - a suave aristocrat, imbued with cachet and good breeding.
So the theory goes, anyway. Like many an object of desire, it can be knee-weakeningly wonderful. Steely, mineral, yet streaked with apples and honey, good Chablis fills your mouth with a penetrating freshness in a way that no other wine can. At its best, the wine writer Hugh Johnson says, it tastes "important, strong, almost immortal". Maybe it's immortality we're after, as a nation? About 85 per cent of the Burgundy sold in Ireland is white wine, and of that, the lion's share is Chablis. I wasn't joking when I said it's an obsession.
Irish buying patterns are interesting. When we're choosing it to drink at home, we usually pick straight Chablis. When we're out in a restaurant showing off, we go one step up, opting overwhelmingly for Premier Cru. More elevated still is Grand Cru, but since that retails here at around £35 a bottle (adding maybe £70 to your dinner bill), its sales are limited. (Even Tiger cubs don't readily shell out that much for white.)
The trouble is that, at every level, there are more bad wines than good. Why? Because Chablis producers went giddy with greed in the big white Burgundy boom of the 1970s and 1980s. New vineyards were planted at a crazy pace, some of them on inferior sites. Have a look at the statistics: 700 hectares of vineyard in total in 1970; 4,500 hectares today. Some land was reclassified upwards - Petit Chablis becoming Chablis, Chablis becoming Chablis Premier Cru and so on - a procedure with the same, convenient potential for financial reward as rezoning scams in our own dear land. Thin wines, bitter as sin, were rushed to eager markets. Things are improving, but the baddies haven't all gone away. To be fair, Chablis growers have their work cut out - for this is a cold, northerly region, closer to Champagne than the rest of Burgundy. In a good year, when the grapes ripen well, there will be exquisite fruit flavours to balance the austere, mineral backbone that is said to come from Chablis's unique geology - for the vines burrow into what was, 150 million years ago, a submerged basin of limestone studded with oyster shells. In a bad year . . . Well, you can guess. No soft, ripe charm - just harshness.
"We're picking the grapes later and later," says Michel Laroche, scion of Domaine Laroche, a quality-driven company which has just celebrated its 150th birthday. "When we start harvesting, 50 per cent of the growers in Chablis have finished." The other 50 per cent are chasing those flavours of honey and baked apples which come from very ripe Chardonnay grapes. But it's not altogether straightforward. Too much ripeness, and Chablis lacks the nervy acidity that makes it so bracingly attractive. William Fevre , a house which, under the new ownership of Bouchard Pere et Fils, is beginning to produce some stunning wines, picks earlier than before - and earlier than most. "For freshness," winemaker Didier Seguir says simply.
On a visit to Chablis a few weeks ago, there was the welcome feeling that producers are adopting various strategies to make better wines. A sunny Saturday morning saw the launch of the Union des Grands Crus de Chablis - an alliance of 19 owners with holdings in the seven Chablis Grand Cru vineyards. These famous plots - Blanchots, Bougros, Les Clos, Grenouilles, Preuses, Valmur, Vaudesir - hugging a south-facing shoulder of land close to the village are supposed to yield Chablis in its finest form. That hasn't always happened to date. Many a Premier Cru outshines a Grand Cru. Many a basic Chablis knocks spots off a lame Premier Cru. But the new association has a quality charter whose effects should soon begin to trickle down.
Guests were treated to a remarkable tasting of 33 Grands Crus from the 19 founder producers, dating back to 1959. Later, we tasted another 70 wines to try to become familiar with the different Grand Cru styles - Les Clos powerfully intense, Les Preuses rounder and more delicate, Blanchots floral and aromatic . . . and so on. It was a challenge, let me tell you, which crushed most of us. The style and quality of the wines depended as much on each producer as on the various plots of hallowed Kimmeridgean soil.
The same is true, I think, for Premier Cru and basic Chablis. The skill of the maker matters far more than the location of the vineyards. Premier Cru doesn't always reward consumers with a better drink for a higher price. There are 40 Premiers Crus, by the way, among which Montee de Tonnerre, Mont de Milieu, Fourchaume, Montmains, Vaillons and Vaudevey are the best known.
The other major factor which determines the style of the wine is oak - or the absence of it. Some producers are violently opposed to putting their wine anywhere near oak barrels. Purity of flavour! they cry. Chablis should be lean and flinty, not buttery and rich! Others disagree. Many Premier Cru and most Grand Cru wines are oaked to some degree. It's one of those topics that gets wine buffs all fired up and prone to allnight arguments - something to bear in mind if you're featuring Chablis at a dinner party. With Christmas only a couple of months away, there'll be a lot of it around.
Now to a few shining examples. All are produced by members of the new Union des Grands Crus.