ON THE corner of Mount Street, outside Market House, stands a statue of Mullingar’s favourite son, the late singer Joe Dolan. The statue, unveiled last winter by Taoiseach Brian Cowen, isn’t even full-size. It manages to make Joe Dolan, who always had a satisfactorily blocky look to him, appear skinny. Even in his bronze Cuban heels, he seems diminished. “It’s a recession version of Joe,” says local councillor Pat Whelan.
When I first visited Paddy Keogh at his company, Wines Direct, in Mullingar in 2000, a tide of wine seemed to be lapping its streets. The town had a new wine bar in Mount Street, The Blue Room, and a specialist wine and gourmet shop in Castle Street, called Cana. Local man Hugh Murray, who first opened The Blue Room, was run off his feet giving courses in wine appreciation.
“You know how it was,” says Whelan who took over The Blue Room when Murray moved on. “Wine was the new Fanta.”
But now the wine tide is receding, as the country changes the way it both eats and drinks. According to supermarkets’ own figures, which do not include Dunnes Stores, national wine sales in 2008 were down by more than 4 per cent, after extremely aggressive wine promotions, particularly between Tescos and Dunnes. (The same supermarket data show that sales of convenience meals were down more than 16 per cent.)
Yet independent wine importers did not have as bad a Christmas as they had been expecting – and neither did the retailers – after a disastrous period which started in July was exacerbated by an increase in duty in the autumn Budget – the first increase for 10 years – and the general decline in consumer spending. But wine importers have laid off staff, and taken their sales representatives off the road.
In Mullingar, The Blue Room and Cana are closed. The original Cana is a bookies and the site of its next incarnation, the Cana off-licence, which specialised in wines, is now a fish shop.
The premises of The Blue Room, which shut five years ago, stand empty. “It became a record shop and then a foreign recruitment business,” says Whelan. “There have been a few changes and a lot of vacancies. I’d say I’d still be open if I’d been allowed sell bottled beer.”
The Blue Room was a sideline for Whelan, who is a solicitor as well as a town councillor. He doesn’t even drink alcohol. But he sees the changes in Mullingar’s alcohol consumption. On December 23rd, he took his staff out for their Christmas lunch and then to pubs afterwards.
“I was shocked. On the eve of Christmas Eve we went to five pubs and they were empty. It scared me.”
Paddy Keogh is very firmly a wine drinker, a wine enthusiast, a wine missionary. He built up Wines Direct with the military precision of someone who was once a commandant in the army, and it thrived. It thrived through the supermarkets’ pugnacious push into the wine trade, and through the arrival of Lidl and Aldi. Wines Direct sells wine from small producers, wine which is not found in supermarkets. When Keogh leaves for the airport on one of his regular foreign trips to meet his growers, he sees many Mullingar people getting into their cars to drive to Dublin at 5am.
2007 was the best year so far for Wines Direct, which was established in 1991. In 2007, Wines Direct shifted in excess of 60,000 cases of wine. But if 2007 was the best of times, it was also the worst of times because, at the end of that October, its premises, near the military barracks, burned to the ground. The day following the fire Keogh was interviewed on Morning Ireland, but he refused to cry.
“I’m not going to dance on my own grave for anybody,” he says.
This robust interview was heard by Brian Cowen, who liked it. It was Cowen, whom Keogh had never met, who opened the gleaming new Wines Direct premises in November 2008. It now employs 25 people, “Full-time, pensions, the lot.”
Recently staff took a 5 per cent pay cut. Wines Direct is now housed in an industrial estate, Lough Sheever, which likes to call itself a corporate estate. A Lidl warehouse is also situated at the Lough Sheever estate, with 58 bays from which to load the trucks which supply its midlands operation.
Of the 60,000 cases of wine Wines Direct sold in 2007, about 75 per cent, according to Keogh, “went to hotels and restaurants. About 20 per cent was sold on the net. And the rest went to the corporate sector, as gifts, particularly round Christmas time.”
Growth in 2008 was minimal: “It was a year of two halves.”
The corporate gift business dried up. Internet ordering increased as more people drank at home, and “the average spend went down in both restaurants and hotels. For example, instead of Sancerre they were now looking at Touraine.” The restaurants started looking for value for money.
“I’m wrecked at the moment from talking about value for money,” says Keogh, who walks for 50 minutes every morning and in fact looks the picture of health. “€30 has become a very important barrier on a wine list.”
On top of all this, the excise duty on a bottle of wine went up 42 cent, and is now €2.45 per bottle. “We were the highest-taxed wine in Europe and now we’ve gone even higher.”
He is very enthusiastic about what he calls “wine education”, and gets a bit downcast when you describe friends of yours who down two bottles of wine every Friday night, once the kids are in bed and the stresses of the week are over. He doesn’t like it when Irish people drink wine “like beer”.
He says that in 2007, “It was amazing. All of a sudden we saw the market shift. Restaurants moved away from Australia and Chile and moved to France and Italy. People were looking for something different. It may have been travel.
“It was certainly exposure to wine, and wine education. Wine education had certainly taken off.”
Now wine courses all over the country are difficult to fill. Wine importers nationwide are saying that business is down anywhere between 15 and 50 per cent. Work has stopped on a large apartment complex in Mullingar.
Bernard Smyth, who opened Cana in 2000, had hoped to specialise in Italian wines. “But so did a lot of other people,” he says. He faced stiff competition, not just from independent companies in the area, but from the supermarkets. Marks Spencer’s opened in Mullingar. He moved across Castle Street and opened his off-licence. “Off-licences were doing extremely well at that time.” Then the Government abolished its ban on below-cost selling and the supermarkets moved in on wine.
“At the same time, the Northern off-licences started advertising in the Westmeath Examiner. That was about two years ago, the end of 2006.”
At Christmas 2007, Smyth saw a significant decrease in business. “About 30-35 per cent. The 30 per cent you’d be depending on to get you through the lean months. It just didn’t add up anymore. I would have lost a lot of money, yeah.” Smyth is currently working in the car business.
What then of restaurants? They are difficult to fill. There is particular worry about the larger restaurants, the 200-seaters.
“The smaller restaurants will do better,” says Paolo Tullio, who once owned Armstrong’s Barn and is now a restaurant critic. But, for restaurants, the question of size is a balancing act. “A single kitchen, one set of chefs, can serve between 60 and 70 people per night. Restaurants which seat 40 or 50 people are operating under par. Over a hundred and you’re looking at doubling staff – you’re looking at a new sort of mathematical equation.”
Restaurants are renegotiating their leases, which were based on the property values that pertained at the beginning of 2008.
Keogh, still bullish, says that all businesses are going to have to hug their customers – news that doesn’t seem to have reached the capital yet.
Hugh Murray, when he sold The Blue Room, became a wine consultant and then worked for Richard Ecock, who is now wine consultant to Dunnes Stores and holds one of the most influential jobs in the wine business.
Murray is now sales director with Classic Drinks, which is based in Cork and supplies hotels and restaurants. He and his two partners remortgaged their houses to start the business which now has eight sales reps on the road, plus a telesales office.
“We grew our sales in December,” he says. “It’s money, money, money, collection, collection, collection. I have one customer who got through 245 cases of champagne in December 2007. This year he went through 65. “A lot of people stopped doing corporate gifts but we’ve already picked up two accounts from people who didn’t get corporate gifts from their suppliers and they were pissed off.
“I’m a believer. I know it’s a tough year ahead. Last year I watched weekly figures. Now I watch daily figures.”
Glass half empty: how the wine has ceased to flow so freely in one pub
UNA AND Pat Weir are a handsome young couple with two young daughters and they run a big pub in the small village of Multyfarnham, not far from Mullingar in Co Westmeath. They serve Paddy Keogh's wines in their restaurant, which seats 55, and at the bar. They used to serve Saint Emilion but, at €35 a bottle they don't any more. They serve €18 Hunter Valley instead. And the complimentary glass of wine you get with the new "early bird" menu isn't Paddy's. "It's a house wine," says Una firmly.
As we speak, Pat is out in Mullingar promoting the early bird menu personally.
Una is convinced that the people who still have money are now frightened to spend it. "They don't want to seem vulgar," she says. "Even though some houses are not affected by loss of jobs or salaries."
Weirs has a full-time chef now, and Una makes the brown bread. "This Saturday night we're having a 21st," she says. "That might be nothing exciting for you, but it means a lot to us."
Before, she would not have disturbed her restaurant customers with a 21st party, but now says,"I have to do it. Things are different."
Weirs is an old pub. "It's been in Pat's family forever," she says. "From the middle of the 19th century. So we're going to stay here. We're going to do everything possible to stay here. What would we do if we left ?"
Una, who is from Tyrellspass, owned a pub before and lost it for a strange reason. "I had a pub of my own in Greece. I had to close because Joe Walsh died. When he died, the management of the tour company changed and they didn't come to the village where I was any more. That was 300 people less a week, and the pub needed that 300. That was in 1994, 1995. It was a previous life."
In recent years, Multyfarnham has lost another restaurant, and the butcher's next door to Weirs closed about three years ago. But it has gained a population from Dublin. "They took the opportunity to move from a three-bedroom semi-detached to a five-bedroom detached house here," says Una. Some newcomers still commute to Dublin. They have integrated well. You can imagine them in the prettiness of Multyfarnham, drinking wine at home.