Pascal Rossignol

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You take a sip, and the wine stops you in your tracks: Boom!

But the Boom! isn't loud. Instead, it's quiet, deep, the Boom! from the centre of sound where there actually is no noise at all. It's the world of good things in a glass, so impressive, so complete, that it doesn't just stop the world, it even seems to sum up the world.

It's an ordinary bottle of Cotes-du-Rhone, from Domaine Chaume-Arnaud, an estate of about 75 acres near to the villages of Vinsobres and Saint-Maurice, close to Nyons. Pascal Rossignol, who imports the wine for his Kilkenny wine shop, Le Caveau, writes of it that “natural methods of viticulture result in wines with great purity, tension and freshness”.

Consider that trio of adjectives: purity; tension; freshness. And consider this: do you have to be born French to be able to write that mix of adjectives? For surely the middle term – tension – is at war with purity and freshness?

Not a bit of it. At least not if you have the intellectual armoury of the French language, with its masterly sense of reconciliation and intricate examination, in your genes. Sip the wine again: purity; tension; freshness. And it is the tension that makes the wine so arresting, that makes it a high-wire act of viticulture, that makes it a high-wire act of culture. It's a wine that is comfortable in its skin. It's sublime.

Pascal Rossignol has wine in his veins. He was born in Gevrey-Chambertin in the heart of Burgundy's Cote d'Or, and in his early twenties he was working as a winegrower in Domaine Joseph Roty. Then he went travelling and working in the hospitality business, in France and the U.K., with a spell as sommelier in the late Michael Clifford's restaurant in Cork city amongst other pitstops, meeting his wife and business partner, Geraldine, along the way. By 1999 they were ready to set up shop in Kilkenny's Market Yard, and Le Caveau has been a shining star in the Irish wine world ever since: small, perfectly-formed, pristine, a treat, a place that is utterly bespoke, where every bottle has had to shine in order to earn it's place on the list, on the shelves.

You don't get to be as good as Le Caveau is without a philosophy, and here M. Rossignol has studied in the shadows of great winemakers such as Pascal Verhaeghe of Cahor's Chateau du Cendre, people who can see the whole world in the wines they make, people of dedication. “We find that the more naturally a wine is made, the truer it really becomes”. Becoming true: what a great vocation for a bottle of wine! And what a typically Burgundian thing to say, and to think, though M. Rossignol isn't just a buff for French and European wines and has star finds from all over the globe on the Caveau list: Santorini from Greece; Zuccardi from Argentina; Ridge from California;  Felton Road from New Zealand.

He wears his expertise lightly and modestly. Last time we saw him, he was pushing several cases of wine on a little trolley through the streets of Kilkenny on a wet evening. Delivering the good stuff, personally.

Market Yard, Kilkenny, County Kilkenny
056 775 2166