Le Caveau

A few years back, Pascal Rossignol explained to The Irish Times what he believed to be the ethos of the culture of wine:
“Honest wine is about trust: wine that is made by good growers, working with good importers and sold to wine drinkers who care."
Twenty one years after M. Rossignol opened his wee tabernacle of a shop in the centre of Kilkenny, we can understand that this mantra has guided the Le Caveau crew right from the outset.
It’s noticeable, for example, that Pascal talks of how ‘honest’ wine creates a duty of trust, between the grower, the importer, and the customer. Without being in the vineyard and the cellar, the punter can’t know that the winemaker has truly sought to make a wine that is honest: honest to the climate, the grape, the soil, the terroir. And this is where the meticulous importer enters the picture, because she is our guardian angel, offering us assurance that the honesty we want from the wine is, indeed, in the bottle.
And because we care about what we drink, and care about how the wine in our glass impacts our planet, we need that assurance.
Le Caveau has provided that assurance for more than two decades, finding the most committed growers and winemakers, seeking out the shining stars of the culture, bringing good things to drink to our tables. Le Caveau has provided a service to wine lovers which is of inestimable value, because they deal in moral values which might appear to be irrelevant to wine – trust; respect; environmentalism; wisdom; care; sociability – but which are actually the foundation of the very culture of wine.
Without these values we are talking about fermented grape juice. With these values, we are talking about one of life’s greatest pleasures.