No Grapes, No Vines, No Problem: Inside Ireland's Most Unconventional Winery

To say Wicklow Way Wines are non-traditional would be apt, though not altogether accurate. They selected manual machines over electrical, and they have always made their wines using traditional methods, but just about everything else about them is different to the norm, from their fruit to their location, to the founder himself. 

Let’s start with the wine. While you will find Wicklow Way Wines for sale in wine shops like Avoca and in restaurants like Chapter One, you might be surprised to find not a single grape vine or grape anywhere. Because Ireland’s climate is not traditionally suited to grape-growing (although a few brave souls are trying), Brett Stephenson uses Irish-grown berries to make his wines. He buys thousands of kilos of organic fruit from local farmers, and, like grapes in traditional

wine, presses them and uses the juice to make his Strawberry, Blackberry, Raspberry, and soon-to-be-released Blueberry wines. 

During his winemaking process, Stephenson does two things differently with the fruit in order to make wine. There is additional filtering to ensure the wine's clarity and longevity. And additional sugar because berries naturally contain less sugar than grapes, and that sugar is critical to producing the wine’s alcohol levels, which sit at a pleasantly light 11% ABV. Aside from that, the processes are almost identical, down to the low-tech machinery they chose because they were familiar with manual equipment from years of making small-batch wine at home for fun.

When you follow your GPS to the winery, you might be surprised to find yourself pulling into a business park in Newtownmountkennedy, County Wicklow, a 50-minute drive south of Dublin City Centre. The space is fit for purpose, but as Stephenson jokes during the tour, people expect to see vines and barrels when they come to a winery, not stainless steel and concrete. In their current form, the tours are educational and entertaining, but the most aesthetically pleasing space is the tasting area, which shares the warehouse mezzanine with musical instruments, speakers, and large bottles of winemaking experiments.

Currently located in an unsuspecting business park, the family are in the process of renovating a 1850’s carriage house in Enniskerry and the acres of land surrounding it.

This will make the winery a destination and offer larger tours while also allowing them to live on-site.  The new space offers the opportunity to grow the business and ideally create a better work-life balance, which is tough when the work currently requires overnight shifts in the cold warehouse to monitor and incrementally increase pressure in the hydropresses. Stephenson understands that making and selling wine alone will not sustain the business, but tours will. This new location offers the chance to build something with more room to grow and more convenience for their family. Like most construction projects, it has become more expensive and is taking longer than expected, but the excitement is still palpable.

Wicklow Way Wines founder Stephenson may not match the image that comes to mind when one pictures a winemaker.

He’s not from a multi-generational winemaking family: he’s an American hippie with a California accent who wears barefoot shoes and a patchwork pageboy hat.

The bulletin boards on the walls of the front office reflect that, covered in vintage ticket stubs for iconic events and concerts like the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones. When he’s not making wine with his son or sleeping in the warehouse so he can monitor the winemaking process, he’s giving tours on the weekends, complete with equipment demonstrations and self-deprecatory stories about his messy learning process.

Brett met his Irish wife Pamela when they both lived in the Boston area. They started family life in California and had their two children before deciding to move to Ireland. This is when he left his career as an audio engineer, mixing music for concerts and commercials. Between the band equipment and the way Stephenson’s face lights up when he talks about a small concert series he’s planning for the new venue, it’s obvious that music was his first love.

The range is called ‘Móinéir,’ which means ‘Meadow’ in Irish.

The wines are unconventional, but delicious. Each bottle of the Strawberry, their first and best-selling wine, has 150 actual strawberries in every bottle, according to Stephenson, and is a match made in heaven with spicy dishes. The Blackberry is made with oak chips and tannin powder, which teases the brain to think about red wine and would

pair perfectly with duck. The Raspberry is high in acid, and makes a fabulous summery aperitif or dessert wine. Each is stunning in colour and in flavour, and has the bonus of being lower in alcohol than most wines at around 11% ABV. They don’t taste like grape wine, but they do taste like wine made with pure respect for local food and winemaking traditions.

This article focuses on Brett Stephenson, but Wicklow Way Wines is truly a family affair. His wife, Pamela, is the Managing Director. His daughter, Celina, is the General Manager and also works a second full-time job in London, where she lives. She is also the founder of Runners High, a women’s running community in London and Dublin, and a social media influencer in her own right. His son, Shane, is Assistant Winemaker/Production Manager and works alongside him at every step of the process. That process takes around 40 hours of mostly manual work, from pressing to bottling to labelling, and is much quicker and less lonely with two.

I look forward to checking back in with Wicklow Way Wines in a year. If Stephenson’s vision comes to fruition, Ireland is set to have a unique new destination that will be a great time for wine and music lovers of all ages.