A decade with a lot of bottle

1980s REVISITED:Wine drinkers were in the minority in the 1980s, although this was all about to change

IT WAS THE decade before the great wine boom. The 1980s were not the most fruitful time for wine in Ireland. Back then, wine drinkers were considered either pretentious or weird, and probably both. Most of what we drank was French, probably Bordeaux, or German, although we were also very partial to two inexpensive Italian wines, Soave and Valpolicella, especially if they came in wicker baskets.

Every November, we would beat a path to the local off-licence to buy our bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau. Supermarkets offered a very limited range, usually one or two bays tucked away down the back of the shop.

But it was during the 1980s that a series of changes began, changes that rocked the world of wine. We were properly introduced to Australia and Chile, two countries that now dominate our wine consumption. We moved on in other ways too. We began the decade drinking Blue Nun, Black Tower and Mateus Rosé and we finished it supping Piat d'Or and Jacob's Creek.

Readers of this column would have been treated to the purple prose of the legendary TP Whelehan, a great wine taster and bon viveur. Tom was always very generous with both his time and wine for this writer. I tracked down a few of his wine columns with the assistance of his son David, who is now wine buyer for O'Briens.

In one piece, TP mentions the crazy price of 350 French francs (around £100) being asked for Château Pétrus 1982. Had we only known . . . today you would have to pay around €3,500 for that same bottle! But browsing through these articles and other price lists, the most surprising thing is how little prices have changed.

In 1986, I joined Mitchell & Son, late of Kildare Street. I still have a copy of my first wine list, which offered Muscadet for £5.88 per bottle - not far off the €8.99 you would pay for the very similar bottle below. Valpol and Soave cost between £4.30 and £4.50, again not a world away for today's prices. In that same list, there were eight pages of Bordeaux wines, six for Germany and Australia had to make do with just one.

Worldwide, things were starting to change. In the UK, Oddbins, an innovative chain of wine shops, was offering Australian wines to a generation of younger drinkers. They were encouraged by a new breed of less formal wine writers led by Oz Clarke. American wine critic Robert Parker began writing his subscription-only Wine Advocate, extolling the virtues of the 1982 vintage in Bordeaux. It is now the most influential wine publication in the world. For the first time, the American, and then the Japanese market, began buying fine claret, enriching the proprietors of the great Châteaux beyond their wildest dreams.

In 1980, we Irish drank a mere 1.3 million cases of wine, including sparkling wine, port and sherry. By 1990, this had increased to 1.7 million cases, a modest improvement but giving little indication of what was to come. It was in the 1990s that the good times really started, with consumption almost trebling to 4.8 million cases by 2000 and reaching eight million cases in 2007.

PIAT D'OR

An attractive young French woman introduces her English fiancé to her father. He is full of Gallic contempt for "le rosbif". However, the young man rescues the situation by producing a bottle of Piat d'Or, the wine the French adore.

In fact, the vast majority of French people had never heard of this wine, a brand created in the UK to appeal to the starter drinker.

It was created in 1978 but this advertisement, which appeared in 1986, marked the real start of one of the most successful brands, taking over from Mateus Rosé, Blue Nun and Black Tower.