Ireland’s Chilean love affair

Chilean wines account for more than a quarter of all wine sold in Ireland. But how did the long, thin shadow come to be cast?

Aurelio Montes, founder of Vina Montes in Chile and Kaiken in Argentina

In the Irish wine market of 2012, as it had been for more than a decade, the race to be the top wine-selling nation was a neck-and-neck contest between Chile and Australia, with France a fairly distant third place. In that same year, these two countries accounted for around 20 per cent of total wine sales between them, with French wine sales running at around 14 per cent of the market.

Today, five ...