HOW quickly we forget. Twenty years ago that mythical creature, the average person, didn't have much truck with personal computers, faxes, sunscreens, hot French sticks or a rake of other things which were soon to make everyday life more endurable. Wine could be lumped in among them. Irish consumption stood at a couple of bottles per head per year - a miserable figure, indicating that while there were still a few stalwarts in our gentlemen's clubs who could down a couple of bottles per head per night, the benighted average person drank only the occasional glass.
Then along came the first supermarket wine promotion women, cheerfully pouring out little samples. We came, we sipped, we purchased. Wine edged its way into the weekly shopping trolley and on to the kitchen table.
Dominique Geary, now chief executive of the Irish office of Sopexa, the French food and wine promotion board, was one of those early in store pourers. In the big Dunnes Stores in Cornelscourt and many of the other new supermarkets around Dublin in the late 1970s she would stand, armed with bottles, tiny plastic glasses, fierce enthusiasm and endearing French accented English, encouraging shoppers to launch into exotic new territory.
"My initial problem was to get people to try wine at all," she says. "The usual reaction was that it tasted very bitter." Michael Donlon, who was already working in Superquinn's wine division at that time, remembers. "Dominique pioneered wine drinking in this country. Forget about French wine. It was a matter of getting Irish consumers interested in wine, full stop. She did an absolutely fantastic job."
She first came to Ireland during Christmas school holidays in the late 1960s, intent on improving her English in time for the baccalaureate. Three days after settling in as a paying guest with a Dublin family, she fell under the spell of a young Irishman. A year later she was back, citing the Paris student unrest of 1968 as the main reason for postponement of her studies. Marriage to the young Irishman followed swiftly - then the arrival of two children and the lure of a part time job.
In Sopexa, Dominique worked from the ground up - from below ground, even. After a few months of running in store wine tastings, she became a part time secretary to the Agricultural Attache in the French embassy - the official within whose ambit Sopexa fell. "My work ranged from the sublime - updating the list of importers of French food - to the ridiculous, running a stock taking audit on all the point of sale material in the freezing basement. Kilos and kilos of paper, and it was January! I thought: `I'm not staying here. But it was the best training I could ever have had'."
Before you could say Vive la France, she was put in charge of promotions and merchandising, which involved escorting an eminent French wine lecturer around the highways and byways of Ireland. "The timing was perfect," she says. "Ireland had just joined the EC, so everything was opening up." We were beginning to munch If Golden Delicious, beginning to buy wedges of Brie, beginning to guzzle wine which, more likely than not, was French.
French wine has not had an altogether easy passage since then.
In the early days, bottles from Italy, Germany and Spain soon clamoured for attention. In the mid to late 1980s, when we Irish consumers had just about familiarised ourselves with the difference between Muscadet and Beaujolais, competition from the New World hit the supermarket end of the trade like an express train.
Although Dominique is far too discreet to say so, many of us dashed off to flirt with new wine cultures, sometimes progressing beyond infatuation to serious dalliance. As in all new relationships, we spurned our old love with accusations of dullness, over-familiarity, unjustifiable expense.
Then, last autumn, French nuclear testing in the Pacific hit the sales of French wines - particularly in the £5-£7 price bracket where supermarket volume resides. The Dublin Sopexa team found themselves having to re-jig five months' promotional planning in four weeks flat, re orienting their strategy. In place of in store competitions came newspaper competitions and the launch of a French wine club.
"Over a thousand members already!" Dominique beams. "The response was so enthusiastic that we could barely cope." She also acknowledges the support of the Irish wine trade. "We ran trade tastings in the midst of the nuclear testing and the attendance was as good as ever. I really appreciated that."
Irish wine merchants' widespread support of French wines over the past few difficult months is based, I would guess, on two things. The first is long term admiration for the petite, chic Frenchwoman who has turned up with a smile and a sheaf of leaflets any time they asked. The other is the deep conviction that in the long run, as in the past, France is the most important wine producing country in the world.
As Dominique says: "It's exciting that one country not very far away can offer wines from so many different regions, each with so much individuality. From the vin de pays which give people who are starting to drink wine a good choice at a good price, through many very affordable appellations, right up to the top ones for the connoisseur."
I think it's time we had another look at the source of so much drinking pleasure.
