There have been years when I thought that we would run out of wild salmon before Christmas, but we never have until now.
It is with regret that we have had to close our order books for Smoked Wild Salmon as from yesterday, November 28th. Hopefully we have sufficient stock to meet our existing orders, but there will be disappointed customers who have, every year over the last twenty or thirty years, enjoyed Ummera Smoked Wild Salmon at Christmas time.
We do have our very successful Smoked Organic Salmon to replace the wild salmon, so all is not lost.
It is our hope that, by leaving the wild salmon alone for a while, there will be significant increase in the numbers of salmon returning to spawn in the rivers and thus restoring the salmon stocks.
I have had suggested to me that maybe we could by wild salmon from elsewhere, Alaska for instance, or Norway, but we have always smoked Irish Salmon and we are very careful about the provenance of our products. Why ship salmon all the way from Alaska to smoke here? Air miles?
Of course this brings back the question: Is it Smoked Irish Salmon or Irish Smoked Salmon? So much of the salmon that purports to be Irish is more than likely to have been salmon farmed in Scotland, the Shetlands, Norway and probably even Chile.
We can vouch for the fact that our organic salmon comes from Clare Island in Clew Bay, Co. Mayo and our wild salmon came from fishermen in West Cork.