Irish Wine Estates

Irish Wine Estates A quiet vineyard dream in the Irish countryside. Wine may come, or it may not
But the story will be worth the watch🥂

24/05/2026

Weather cannot stay this good 😩

Immediately after we planted the heavens opened and delivered 30mm of rain over a week.

Now the heat 🥵 has arrived and a hot week is forecast.

Fingers crossed our 3,700 vines are getting a good start to their lives here in South Offaly.

What do you think we should be watching out for?

23/05/2026

Trigger alert.

This is how we planted our 3,700 vines.

Some experts will tell us we did things wrong, particularly around not watering the vines as we planted them.

Logistically we had a problem with watering due to having no running water in the farm at the moment.

That said, probably the top expert in English Viticulture, Stephen Skelton MW does not routinely water when he is planting vineyards.

Fingers crossed they will be OK.

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21/05/2026

Buds emerging already across the vineyard.

Following planting we've had almost 30mm of rainfall over the past few days which have given the vines a good watering.

Dry and warm weather forecast for the next week.

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21/05/2026

Heron spotted in the river.

Absolutely massive.

For us this is further evidence of the fish and eels present in the river which is so exciting from a biodiversity perspective.

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20/05/2026

Department of Agriculture inspector is coming to test our vines for diseases I cannot pronounce.

Fingers crossed it should be fine as all vines were sourced from approved European nurseries and were supplied with plant passports.

We notified the Department of what we have received as you're supposed to do and our reward is an inspection 😇

But hey ho.

We are trying to do everything right from day 1.

When Nicola took the call I was reminded of the old Frank Kelly sketch (iykyk) where he is a rural farmer taking a call from the revenue.

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19/05/2026

What has it cost us to plant 3,500 vines over the past couple of weeks?

Our best day when we planted 700 vines cost us an average of €0.51 per vine but over the entire job our average was €1.08

As has been the case on every step of this journey, so far, we start out fumbling along, making mistakes and refining our processes.

By the time we finish we have become quite slick.

I'm certain that with the learnings from this year we will be much more efficient next year.

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18/05/2026

Its non stop.

As soon as the vines are planted we need to think about installing training posts which will support the vines in their early years.

We have selected 6mm galvanised rebar which is costing us about 65c each.

These are 1.2m long and we are not looking forward to the task of installing them.

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17/05/2026

Our mature whitethorn hedges have been around a long time and are an amazing source of biodiversity.

They are interspersed with an amazing array of flora and fauna all playing key roles in maintaining a biodiverse habitat.

This habitat then provides shelter and homes to a wide array of life that is all interdependent.

We see our role being to protect and nurture this biodiversity in parallel with establishing our vineyard.

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16/05/2026

Brown trout fry spotted numerous times this week in our stretch of river.

We had a level of optimism last autumn that our river could be suitable spawning ground for brown trout.

It joins the Little Brosna river about a mile from here in Clonlisk.

There is a lovely gravel bed and well aerated water so the conditions are right.

Water quality is quite good so we are really excited this week to have seen fry on numerous occasions.

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15/05/2026

3,500 vines planted by the end of week 2.

Quite a relaxed week this week thanks to a massive team effort last week.

We planted 1,000 vines including the delayed French vines.

There's one very short row with about 60 vines to plant which James will plant tomorrow morning.

We have 200 excess Seyval Blanc which are excess which we will plant at the end of next week.

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14/05/2026

Let's break out the Champagne, or better still a sparkling white.

But they are here and will be planted over the next couple of days.

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Ballyclery
Roscrea

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