Henriot Souverain Brut

This post refers to Tuesday, June 29th, our first night in Ireland. Treasa and I flew into Shannon and proceeded to the car rental counter to pick up our Hyundai i30 turbo diesel. This car was really fun to drive. Except for the fact that everything was on ‘the wrong side.’ The driver’s seat was on the right, you drove on the left side of the road and I had to shift with my left hand. Luckily, the pedals were oriented normally, with the clutch on the left, brake in the middle and gas to the right.

And if that wasn’t nerve wracking enough, a combination of narrow, seemingly medieval roads and psychotic Irish drivers was sufficient to make me wholeheartedly appreciate my first Guinness. But I’ll get to that. In so far as the roads were concerned, picture this: all of the various and frequent corners are blind because the road serface is below field level with grasses and shrubbery lining the pavement. One road was so narrow that the aforementioned grass was hitting each of the side mirrors and the speed limit was 80 km/hr. And for the cherry on top, the road is a two way street!


After driving north to see the Cliffs of Moher, we head back down near Limerick to the Adare Manor. If you follow golf, you’ll recognize Adare Manor from the JP McMannus ProAm Tiger Woods played in the weekend following our stay. Because of the upcoming event, we saw the Manor’s grounds in a state of absolute perfection.

We went into the clubhouse for the golf course, watched some Gaelic football, and had our first Irish Guinness. It really does taste better there. Then had our second.


By this time it was getting close to dinner, so we had a bottle champagne sent up to our room while we were getting ready. The staff selected the cheapest champagne on the wine list…for E78 (I’m going to use a capital ‘E’ to denote Euro’s) which after the American Express currency conversion, leaves me with a $106 line item on this month’s credit card statement. And this is how we were introduced to Henriot Souverain Brut. By no means was this a bad bottle of champagne, but I feel comfortable putting a ‘nothing special’ label on it. And considering Domaine Ste Michelle can be had for about $95 less, well, we’ll chalk this one up to first night on the honeymoon indulgences.