BUBBLE BROTHERS – CORK WINE MERCHANTS

Taste some wines from the south of France
with Julian from Bubble Brothers
AGA shop, Lapp’s Quay, Cork

Thursday 16th July 7pm for 7.30pm

Ticket €10/person

The best way to find out whether you like the wines that Bubble Brothers sell is to taste them, of course.

There seems to be more demand than ever for tastings – hardly a day goes by without an enquiry as to whether we do tastings, run wine courses, &c. Despite the recent decision of the Wine Board, which has  until now overseen the majority of certified wine courses in Ireland, to “cease… educational activity“, I don’t think we can stretch to a full-scale educational programme at the moment.

However, we are about to begin a series of informal, for-fun tastings of our wines, in the very appropriate and good-looking surroundings of Cork’s AGA shop – part of the same block that houses the Irish Examiner’s offices, the Club Brasserie and the Boardwalk on Lapp’s Quay.

The AGA shop displays and sells the iconic range cookers that do pretty much stand for “a way of life”, as the AGA website puts it, but it also sells all kinds of sturdy and beautiful kitchenware, shown off in kitchenly surroundings that are also just the job for a bit of wine tasting.  Future events may take fuller advantage of this food-preparation-friendliness…

The inaugural get-together will be on Thursday 16th July, at 7.30 pm. I’ve put together a selection of eight wines from the south of France for sampling and enjoyment. I’ll introduce them and talk about them, but the approach will be relaxed. The wine is interesting, but so is the meeting and chatting (I’m not really entitled to call it craic, am I?).

Eithne and Nollaig at the AGA shop are as enthusiastic as I am about this collaboration, and have promised a 20% discount on some of their very seriously desirable AGA cookware: pots, pans, kettles and so on (not the stoves themselves, though!) on the night.

I’m still working on some special offers on the wine side – rest assured there’ll be deals all right.

You can buy tickets @ €10/person here.

This all came about thanks to Anthony Cresswell of Ummera Smokehouse in Timoleague – and Twitter.

At a recent food fair in the AGA shop, Anthony (@ummera), besides demonstrating that he has no intention of giving up smoking,

announced a competition question to win an AGA-ish prize using his Twitter account, and I was able to reply almost immediately because I was sitting in front of a computer that told me the answer.

So my breach of etiquette won me the particularly splendid AGA kettle you see in the picture, which I happened to need (some salve to the conscience).  When I went to collect it, I couldn’t resist rather going on about my day job.  So there’s the, er, backstory.