I Found The Best House Wine In a Beer City

Is that what you do? Let's drink it. I could get in a real mess with that. I'm in Dublin to check out house wine, right? Most people come for the Guinness. We're at the home of Guinness, Temple Bar, but I want the house wine. Now the house wine is is normally the cheapest wine on the restaurant or bar wine list or sometimes it's the number two and the number three but it should be the wine that the proprietor is really proud of. If the house wine's good the rest of the wine list is good. I'd describe it as highly chuggable so come with me to see whether the Temple Bar has a highly chuggable glass of house wine. It might be noisy let's play. What colour? Rose red wine. What's that? White. I'll have a white. I love you on TikTok by the way. Fantastic mate. It's got a vibe, it's got a vibe. Can I have some white wine please? Let's go have our house wine. Come on! Okay so I'm looking, I'm looking for something zippy and fresh and very clean. I want to know how do they keep it? Has that bottle been open long? Very fresh. I'm starting to speak now. ****, it's good. It's very fresh, zesty. €12.50 a glass. It's not cheap, but it slips down like a greasy chip. And you meet all these amazing people! Yay! Magnifique! Wait, how was that? Everything golden. You know what, come and drink anything in there and the house wine is really good. It goes particularly well with the Proclaimers. Okay, let's time travel to the 1980s. Oldest wine bar in Dublin, La Cave. Look at this. Look at this. This is not natural wine. This is old school. Look at this place. Mate, I'm pissed already. This is amazing. This place is actually crazy. Look at this. Is it pretty much the wine list that you had 30 years ago? Yeah. Okay, so my house wine, I want something soft, juicy, can go with anything, really easy drinking, but I want it to have bright fruit. I don't want it to be open for two weeks and taste of your boot, Fred. Hold it. And that tastes really beautifully juicy and fresh. I could drink boatloads of that with pretty much anything on the menu. So we've got the classics. We've got snails, we've got goat's cheese salad, French onion soup, duck liver parfait. Nothing vegan? Absolutely nothing vegan at all. Now here, your full-on, fully loaded French. What do you mean you don't know what a Kir Royale is? Right, let's get, I'm gonna get Sue so that I can show you what a Kir Royale is. Yeah, it's crème de cassis, which is like black, Alcoholic Ribena, they put it to about there and then they top it up with champagne and it just makes the champagne a little bit sweeter and slip down just a little bit easier. Always have your pinky out. Now, clock out because I've got a couple of glasses to finish. The world needs more wine bars like that so I've just spent 52 euros on a bottle of house wine rather than a glass and a Kir Royale. You tell me how much the Kir Royale was. Er, 26 euros. F***ing hell! Kir Royale at 26 euros, I love Dublin, someone's making money. If you want to find out what old style French wine bars are like with Edith Piaf music and everything else, in fact, even if you don't, listen to Edith Piaf and have a glass of beautiful house wine in La Cave. And if you're feeling flush, get a Kir Royale at 26 euros. If you don't want a house wine, or get arrested, have a Guinness. So that's a Dublin house wine. Look at that, look at that. Can I go and play split the G? There's a lot of gas. Is that what you do? Yeah, go on, drink it! So tell me, is a spice bag something you smoke or eat? You smoke. What the f**k is a spice... Chips! These smell good. What's this? Chicken. Chicken? Is this uniquely Irish? This is f***ing crazy. Next stop on the hunt for great house wine is Notions and this place does special stuff. Might you be Zoe? I am indeed. I'm Tom. Nice to meet you. I'm literally pissing my pants with excitement. The bathroom's that way. You're a baker in the morning. Yes. Two pubs, and now you're Notion's wine bar. Yes! I can't believe it. Tell me how this started, please. Oh, so we'd been running the cafe for nine years, we'd started the bakery, and we'd always thought about using the building in the evening. Tell me, I love it. I literally... But you... I get a feel that you love the wine bit of it now as well. I do! So our go-to is kind of like our basic... These are like what I would think might be a house wine. Exactly, yeah. Three whites, or are these different colours? There, there are three whites. Can you not see the little white around him? Sorry, I'm very, I don't get out much. I don't believe that for a minute. Okay, yes, I think we need to give this man some wine. Nicholas, we need a wine. It's all going to ----. What have we got? We have a lovely Vina Illusion, which is from, it's a Rioja, or Rioja for the Irish. So we have a lovely zippy finish on that. It's quite crispy. Come on, let's have a taste. Let's have a taste, yeah. Ladies first. Us three. Juicy and zippy. Zippy, exactly. Both of those. You're absolutely right. That's the sort of wine I could come in here and just drink. Easy peasy, super lemon squeezy. Why did you choose it? This came through one of our suppliers, Grape Circus, so they would come to us with a selection of bottles and we would sit and go through them and this was one of the ones that really jumped out at me. So everything from food to coffee to wine gets rated out of 10 and if it doesn't go above an 8 it doesn't get picked. Does nothing get a 10? You'd love to try the... Is it open? It might be yeah yeah yeah okay. I better have a drink. Drink. Drink. Drink. So this would be kind of our go-to kind of fairly standard house red but it's so good. So this is your go-to red? This is our real real go-to red that you know you can give to everyone and they're going to enjoy. Everyone comes in a glass of this. Yeah. It's brambly it's like got really sort of Sort of like juicy brambly fruit. I'm dying to have some more of this. I could get in a real mess with that, it's very very soft and juicy, it's delicious. It's also got some character, I love it. A white, a red, they're not house, they're go-to, Zoe I love it. Thank you so much, you've got to come here. I'm one of your biggest fans! No you're not! I'm always holding on your phone! She needs to get out more. Yeah. So Odette, do you mind if I sit here? Walk away! A house wine is something that you can drink all day, with food, without food, and with Odette? Odette. And with Odette? Odette! Odette! Take three! Three! With food, without food, you never get bored of it, particularly when you meet Odette. You're literally brilliant. Release form!