I nabbed Ronan Farrell from Straffan Wines at the Californian Wine Fair a couple of weeks ago. He’s the latest victim in my “introjuicing series”; giving you a little more insight on the people behind the wines.

1. Firstly, Ronan, what do you do at Straffan Wines?

Working in a small company you tend to do more than a title can explain. I do all of our buying, marketing, web stuff, sales in Dublin, plenty of deliveries and shifting boxes, accounts, paperwork etc. It’s hard work wearing different hats all the time, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

2. Tell me about your background, how did you get into wine?

My earliest memory of wine would be sitting on top of boxes in the back of a Citroen BX with my three siblings, long-hauling wine from Calais back to Ireland. Literally luggage on roof-rack, kids in boot, wine on seats.

I guess I was brought up in a house where there were always more than a few bottles knocking about, but I didn’t personally get interested until I was about 19. If I’m to be totally honest I didn’t really get what was so interesting about wine initially, and certainly didn’t become a complete anorak until I had visited a couple of vineyards. Visiting Tokaji really took it to another level for me.

3. Straffan has a really interesting start-up story, can you elaborate?

My father (Chris) worked in IT his whole life, and decided around the time of the millennium that he had had enough. My folks began to import wine from France around the time that I realized that my *cough* career in music *cough* began to look a little unlikely.

I started working part time with them as I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. It took off from there pretty quickly as I discovered my palate and got interested in the geographical nature of it – now we represent wines from ten different countries. We’re lucky to get on well enough to work well together and be able to separate work from family. We have a similar “hands off” style when it comes to filing paperwork.

4. A key thing you mentioned while chatting and indeed on your site and facebook page is provenance of wine. Why is that important?

It’s absolutely critical – wine would be any other fruit juice without that ability to translate a sense of place. I’ve visited enough vineyards now to know that healthy fruit is 90% of the challenge, and to get that you need correct site selection, care and attention in the vineyard, and sustainable methods of viticulture.

Provenance for me is irrefutable quality that can only have come about through good viticulture and judicious winemaking practices. This whole movement at the moment with flavour-modifying yeasts and the like is crazy – taken to the logical conclusion we will end up with a sea of identical juice. That’s why we need to champion the guys who understand the concept of provenance.

5. Any particular favourite wine or one you go back to and why? And best food/wine combination?

I guess Tempranillo is probably the grape I go back to most, to me it’s as just good as Pinot Noir at conveying a sense of place and showing real class when grown correctly; plus it also is so adaptable in the hands of a good winemaker.

I’ve been fortunate to come across wines like El Molinet, Arrocal, and Ramon Bilbao ‘Single Vineyard’ that offer phenomenal quality at the €12-15 mark. I think the quality from Spain at that price point is pretty much unrivalled.

To be honest I generally tend to ignore the whole food & wine pairing thing – I believe that a good wine has to be fruit forward, and any wine with enough primary fruit will marry well with most dishes. People get very precious about stuff like this, and obviously there are exceptions and pairings that really work quite well but I only recently had a Californian Sauvignon Blanc with Lamb Chops (cooked in Calabrian style, with chilli, garlic & lemon zest) and that worked great.

6. What’s your favourite region and why?

Ok so it’s a country but Spain would be where my head is mostly at these days. No other country has as many producers consistently hitting that perfect mix of Old World and New – healthy, unadulterated fruit grown in unique locations and being turned into contemporary, fruit-driven wines.

Within Spain the regions that are really interesting me at the moment are Valdeorras, Emporda, Terra Alta and Montsant.

Outside of Spain, California has always fascinated me too, but most of the good stuff rarely makes it out of the States.

7. Any thoughts on closures, cork v screwcap?

There’s been so much written about this in the last two years, and to me there’s a pretty simple answer: screwcaps & composite corks for all early drinking wines and high quality corks for everything else. If a producer invests in proper quality corks there are very rarely any problems with TCA or oxidization.

The major difficulty is with cheap natural corks for cheap wines. One of our producers Wirra Wirra (McLaren Vale, Australia) bottle everything under screwcap, including premium reds like Dead Ringer that will age twenty plus years. I guess a lot of it depends on the style of the wine and whether it’s being made to be approachable young as well as mature.

8. What’s up and up coming in terms of wine style or new countries/regions?

The Spanish regions I mentioned above are worth watching, but a style that I’m really encouraging people to check out at the moment is New World Riesling. So many people begun drinking wine in the last few years with Kiwi Sauvies, and there’s only so far you can really go with Sauvignon to be fair – next logical step is dry Riesling from the southern hemisphere.

Similar profile but with that touch more complexity and character. Portugal too, there is some seriously good juice coming out of the Douro, Dao and Bairrada.

9. What’s getting you excited in the wine world right now?

Wine 2.0, undoubtedly. The ability to reach people online through social networks, and even from a sales point of view how we relate to each other in friendlier, more relaxed terms now.

That old boys club, monocle and jacket crap that has surrounded wine as a whole is vanishing, and it’s no longer being seen just as a treat with a nice meal. Producers in a lot of cases are making more accessible wines, both stylistically and label wise. Ultimately, wine is beginning to lose its stuffy rep. in Ireland and other young wine drinking countries.

10.  What’s with “Bordeaux’s best vintage in a century” declaration every 2 years?

I’m probably the worst person you could ask that question to! It drives me crazy, it’s like the grapes only manage to ripen about three years every decade and they are all magically the “vintage of the century”.

Winemakers are bad marketers, and marketers make bad wine – it’s either some inflated luxury good for the bourgeoisie among us or its paint stripper dressed up with a cutesy image of a non-violent furry animal. Discard those two ends of the market and you’re left with the real stuff (which unfortunately is rarely marketed at all). I’m not going to make any friends with this comment, but if the average producer in the outlying parts of Bordeaux used less chemicals and started understanding their environment they’d find pretty quickly that they could make good wine every year.

11. Anything else you’d like to add?

A shamless plug I guess? We now sell direct to the public through our site www.straffanwines.ie (register to see prices), and our facebook page has weekly competitions as well as special offers to redeem on the site.