Without wine, life would be a mistake – Bill Kelly
Managing Director, Kelly's Hotel, Rosslare, Bill Kelly talks about wine and life
Bill Kelly is responsible for the lauded wine cellar at Kelly’s Hotel, in Rosslare, directly importing some 60,000 bottles each year from growers in France, Italy, Germany, South Africa and Spain. The wines can be purchased via the Kelly’s Hotel website.
“I was lucky in that when I went to hotel school in Switzerland we had a wine professor who taught us in first year and gave us a love for wine. We were tasting wines at 8 o’clock in the morning, which is very unusual.
“We set up a little wine club and we used to go off to visit various growers in Burgundy and the Jura and the Rhone Valley, and it was on one of those trips to Burgundy that it really clicked. Just to meet the wine grower whose hands were black from working in the vineyard and working with the soil, this was a man who could have been producing potatoes and here he was producing wine. And that gave me an insight, because to us at that time wine was a posh product that was sold in fancy restaurants.
“But here it came back to the sheer basics of agriculture, a natural product made totally naturally, from vines that are actually grown in quite poor soil. And it just fascinated me, fascinated me.
“From that day on I became passionate about the story of wine, and the story of Burgundy especially, because the wines offer so much diversity, not only in terms of grape varieties, but also because of the diversity of the soil characteristics, and the history of the geological influences over millions of years which have broken up the various plots.
“Sometimes the plots can be 100 metres from each other, and yet the style of wine from one plot to another changes so much. To me it’s fascinating, it’s a fascinating product, and such a natural product that people can get to enjoy.
“With great winemakers, the wine is not made in the cellar. The wine is made in the vineyard, and it is care in the vineyard that actually makes the wines at the end of the day. And I think that’s so beautiful. It shows you how natural a process it is when made in that non-industrial way.
“If I had to choose the work of just two winemakers, one would be my brother-in-law, Vincent Avril, of Clos des Papes, in Chateauneuf du Pape. He was voted Winemaker of the Year in 2025 in the Revue des Vins de France. And it’s not because he’s my brother-in-law, it’s because he has devoted his life to Clos des Papes, to his vineyards, and his passion for quality at every level is just unbelievable.
“With Vincent it’s about picking nearly grape by grape with each bunch to make sure the end quality is right. He really doesn’t care about the total return, or the yield on each hectare of vine. For him, it’s making certain the quality of every bottle is top notch. It’s that level of precision that is required to make great wines, not only in great vintages but to make great wines even in difficult vintages.
“And the second person would be Jean Ramonet of Domaine Ramonet. It’s his attachment to the soil and to the vines. He’s out there himself in the vineyard pruning, he’s up at 5am bottling wines and the sheer energy and passion he has for the wine business is second-to-none.
“And he has a philosophy of offering his wines at prices that I think are affordable, though they are not always affordable when they wind up on restaurant lists. But the initial price from the cellar is one where he wants people to be able to drink the wines, he doesn’t want wine to be an elitist product. He wants people to drink his top wines, and that’s what I love so much about him.
“For me, at Kelly’s, I try my utmost to keep the price of all these higher end wines down so that people can enjoy them. So we just take a financial margin on the wine, not a percentage margin, because it’s more important that people get the opportunity to drink these great wines. There’s no point having wines on a wine list that nobody buys.”
Interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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