Soundbite: Ronan Farrell – WineLab


Posted April 10, 2018 in Food & Drink Features

In cities such as San Francisco and London wine drinkers are getting used to seeing their wine of choice poured from a tap rather than a bottle. As the practice gains traction here, WineLab co-founder Ronan Farrell tells us more about the sustainability model underlying the wine-on-tap movement.

 

Ronan, tell us how you got involved in the wine business?

After college I began working with my father in the small wine importation business he had set up in 1999 and I just fell in love with the subject. When we sold that business, I began to study winemaking by distance with UC Davis in California. That’s where I first became aware of wine on tap and how in the States it was very much used as a preservation method for premium wines. I discovered that the technology had actually existed in Italy for about forty years, but never really travelled too far beyond there because of the inefficiencies involved in transporting the steel kegs they used back to local wineries for refilling. I spent about two years researching and sourcing a more environmentally friendly solution, before launching WineLab in 2013 with my business partner Richie Byrne.

How important is sustainability to your business model?

It’s an absolute game changer. The beauty of moving from glass to a lightweight keg is that you reduce the amount of material that needs to be recycled by about 95%. Because the kegs we use are so light, we can fit about twice as much wine on a pallet, which results in half as many trucks on the road with half as many emissions. There are huge benefits to that, and our idea from day one was to use the savings from packaging to source better quality wine.

Wine on tap is still a relatively new concept in Dublin. How easy have you found it to persuade people to migrate from bottle-poured?

When you bring anything new to the market you can get reluctance initially. Virtually every other beverage you can buy has had a renaissance point in the last ten years, everything from drinking yoghurts to tea to top shelf gin and wine is the one product that hasn’t. One of the most common things we used to hear was “my customers aren’t ready for this” but I think the market has changed now. We’re much less prone to buy based on convention and more interested in things that are experimental and new.

One of the big misconceptions about wine in a keg is that it must come from some horrible industrial plant outside Turin somewhere, but the reality is that while wine on tap doesn’t look the same, it’s actually wine that’s been shipped in a more environmentally sound way, with less preservatives, in a package that guarantees that every glass you pour is going to be served exactly as the wine maker intended. I think our customers get that and we’ve close to 400 outlets doing wine on tap throughout Ireland now.

What type of wines do you have available on tap?

The wines that tend to work well are bright and aromatic, so we look for wines that are pretty pure and brightly flavoured with moderate levels of alcohol and fresh natural acidity. We tend to avoid oak and other adjuncts and we’ve always looked to have about 20% less added sulphur in our wines than you find in conventional bottles. Also, because we don’t use any animal by-products, all of our wines on tap are vegan.

Do you think natural wines – where makers use less technology and additives – are starting to make an impact now?

In volume terms they’re still very niche, but in terms of visibility they are beginning to make waves. Throughout my career I’ve always looked for wines that are “light-touch”, so we have two wines with no added sulphur that are what you would classify as quintessentially natural wines. We have a Côtes du Rhône from Eztézargues, one of the most groundbreaking, forward thinking co-ops in Europe. They went organic in the 80s, biodynamic in the 90s and then in the 2000s they stopped using sulphur altogether. We also work with a winemaker called Fabien Jouves, a bit of an enfant terrible who’s very highly regarded in the natural wine world. He makes a custom blend of Tannat, Malbec and Cabernet Franc for us and we also have vins de soif, which harks back to the way wine used to be made. It’s very aromatic with a bit of residual CO2 and a very slight spritz to the tongue so very fresh, vibrant and juicy.

 

What else do you have in the pipeline?

People are always looking for products that are more sustainable and environmentally friendly so we’re delighted to be launching En Vrac, a take home wine-on-tap solution at Dollard & Co. The idea is that, in addition to buying lovely food and ingredients there, you’ll be able to pour your own bottle of wine for consumption that night.

We’re also looking at piloting a closed-loop recycling programme for our kegs. This involves collecting our kegs in Dublin, having them crushed and baled and then sent back to the production plant in the Netherlands. The process exponentially reduces the amount of plastics required to make new kegs, resulting in a massive reduction in carbon footprint, energy consumption and plastic creation. This will make wines on tap in the outlets we supply a zero waste system, so we’re very excited about that.

Wines on tap from WineLab can be found in Dublin restaurants such as Etto, Coppinger Row, Hey Donna, Chameleon, San Lorenzos, Robertas, The Winding Stair, Legal Eagle, Matt The Threshers and more.

For full details see Winelab.ie

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