Canadian-born Advanced Sommelier, Certified Sherry Educator, and President of the Irish Guild of Sommeliers, Morgan VanderKamer runs UNioN Wine Bar & Kitchen like a stage – the open kitchen in full view, where Gunderloch Jean-Baptiste Kabinett and Kilmore Quay crab might share the spotlight…
‘London taught me how to be a sommelier,’ says Morgan. ‘But I wasn’t allowed to stay – it wasn’t seen as a skilled occupation.’ She moved through Richard Corrigan’s Bentley’s, D&D London, and L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon, slipping into José Pizarro’s sherry bar on her days off, watching how guests, coaxed gently, lost their fear of the unknown glass. Then the visa collapsed beneath her. Back in Vancouver, she gave herself a deadline: ‘two months to find a way back. Lose momentum or force open a door that wasn’t meant to be there.’
The door opened in Ireland. With a work permit secured, she stepped onto the floor at Kevin Thornton’s Michelin-starred Dublin restaurant, where fate first put Stephen McArdle at one of her tables. ‘I recommended a bottle of Castello di Verduno Barbaresco.’
It could have ended as a passing exchange between diner and sommelier, but months later a supplier reintroduced them, this time with more consequence. ‘Though Stephen and I didn’t get together until 2017 – he was more my boss than my partner for quite some time.’
Stephen was already on his own path – a classically trained chef who had cooked in London, Belfast and Dublin, convinced that Irish produce deserved the same respect as French. He opened Stanley’s on St. Andrew’s Street, a modern Irish restaurant with a dining room above and a wine bar below, its leaded windows catching the light and its sherry list ambitious enough to lure both the curious and the trade. It was here Morgan refined her by-the-glass game, built on offbeat varieties and dishes shaped to meet them.
Years later they opened Barrow’s Keep in Thomastown, County Kilkenny, in a former grain store. In 2019 they moved again, this time to a converted townhouse with a conservatory strung with olive trees, bright white tables, and a cellar carried over from Dublin. But Morgan soon faced a shock which still lingers. ‘There were moments I wondered when those wines would move,’ she recalls. In rural communities, wine could be seen as intimidating; expensive bottles placed an operator on a pedestal instead of drawing people in. The jolt was clear – what thrived in Dublin could falter entirely less than two hours down the road. Adaptation was no longer an option; it was survival.
‘Lockdown brought us to a crossroads,’ she says, as Barrow’s Keep lurched through stop-start trading and social distancing. By 2021, she and Stephen stood on the edge of a decision: retrench and play safe, or gamble on something larger, riskier, more exposed. ‘We chose risk.’ In June 2022 they opened UNioN in Waterford, a city of 60,000 with no tradition of a serious wine bar – and every chance it could fail.
There would be no Pinot Grigio. Instead, the by-the-glass list ran to Jurançon Sec, Merseguera from Alicante, the gamut of Chenin and Riesling, and sherry ‘slipped in quietly’. Many pours came from magnums, each a test of the city’s willingness to follow. Even the name felt distinctive. The unusual capitalisation of UNioN, now on the sign on the lamppost outside, wasn’t a marketing trick but a lockdown experiment at the kitchen table. On screen the word looked flat; a few tweaks later, the mixed capitals gave it presence, bite – enough to stand out without shouting.
Time, Tide, and The Cellar Beneath
UNioN stands in front of the Waterford Medieval Museum, fewer than 100 metres from what Morgan calls ‘the original wine cellar of Ireland’. In the late Middle Ages, barrels were rolled straight off the River Suir into cool stone vaults, as Waterford rivalled Bristol for imports, with only New Ross offering anything close. In the museum above UNioN, Belgian amphorae and French clay jars still bear witness to wine’s place as civic lifeblood.
In those same vaults, cut from stone around 1440, the inaugural SommiT took place in October 2022 – a trade-only convocation of food and wine professionals convened by the Irish Guild of Sommeliers, with Morgan as President. A year later it returned with a public day, SommiT for Enthusiasts, drawing paying guests to question sommeliers, chefs, producers, and service staff beneath the same arches that once stored Suir-borne barrels. For Morgan, it was proof that Ireland, long a crossroads of trade, could also take its place in the global conversation on wine.
A Partnership Forged Over Sherry
Her working method with Stephen began at Stanley’s over an ambitious sherry list which drew the Consejo Regulador. A Bodegas Tradición dinner had them reverse-engineer dishes to match the glasses. Sherry became their training ground for how wine could lead food. At UNioN, that principle survives: a wine-bar list where new pours inspire plates, and a main menu anchored in pairings. ‘Sometimes I pick the region; Stephen looks at its dishes and adjusts flavours. Because we source from small producers, the seasons change, and we adjust. By the glass changes every week.’
Morgan’s route to the sommelier floor was anything but linear. She studied hotel management in Vancouver, worked housekeeping at Fairmont Banff Springs, then transferred to food and beverage hotel before moving to Whistler. There, restaurant manager, Steve Edwards made sure his team had ironed shirts and could name the grapes of Bordeaux while they polished glasses. ‘High intensity,’ she says. ‘I still do a lot of that today. It keeps the standards sharp, the knowledge fresh, and reminds the team that wine service is constant thinking as much as pouring.’
Winning Best Sommelier in Ireland in 2021 coincided with Morgan’s election as President of the Irish Guild of Sommeliers, a role she quickly turned from ceremonial to active.
She pushed through WSET training, workshops for restaurateurs, and founded an Irish Sommelier Educational Team which, after lockdown, rejected the occasional grand gesture in favour of small, regular sessions which kept knowledge alive. ‘It’s not just about the bottom line. It’s about the culture in your restaurant and your region.’ Now, she says, her mission is to knit members together across the country.
Part of that culture, she insists, must be an awakening to Irish wine. Just east of Waterford, David Dennison – who once represented Ireland in Sommelier competitions in the 1990s – coaxes Rondo, Solaris, and Sauvignon Gris from clay and shale alongside cider apples. ‘They need time. Look where the UK was ten years ago, Canada twenty years ago. The Irish wine community has to rally behind its own story.’
Vinous Presence
For Morgan, running UNioN is as much about presence as it is about wine. She is not just curator of the list but part of the room’s rhythm – one half of a team shaping the whole experience. ‘You become the place. If you’re not in the place, you lose something,’ she says. For the next decade, that place is Waterford: welcoming locals and travellers, pouring cellar treasures alongside an expanding parade of pét-nats and new discoveries, holding the line for wines which provoke as much as they charm. And in UNioN’s open setting, where every move is on display, she often recalls – with a wry smile – the moment, in another life, when she was handed a $295 Italian red to decant. ‘I think it was a Brunello. Typically, only the sommelier opened those bottles. I broke the cork at the table, right in front of the guests. But I sorted it out…’
If she could share one of her bottles with anyone? ‘Anthony Bourdain,’ she answers without pause. ‘He had an incredible way of reaching people. He crossed boundaries many people didn’t. For a lot of us in hospitality, he set the mark.’ His photograph hangs in UNioN’s kitchen, a constant reminder. ‘He went everywhere, tried everything, immersed himself in the culture. Coming from a chef’s perspective, that’s pretty cool. But for me, it’s about how he listened. He’d drink whatever was poured, eat what was put in front of him, and talk to everyone. That’s what hospitality should be.’ The kind of creed which feels at home in the vaults beneath, where for centuries wine has spoken of bonds, and where his voice might have joined the murmur of merchants, sailors, and strangers passing through.
What’s On at UNioN
Glasses
Mas Candi Ovella Negra Penedes 2022
Mullineux Kloof Street Chenin Blanc 2023
Chateau de Montifaud Pineau des Charentes NV
Bottles
Tyrrell’s Vat 1 Semillon 2015
Bibi Graetz Soffocone di Vincigliata 2015
Kir-yianni Diaporos Xinomavro 2012
Tyler Bien Nacido Vineyard Old Vine Pinot Noir 2015
Clos la Coutale La Griotte Cahors 2023 (from the ‘Last Ones’ List)
