Booze cruise: Conor Pope’s winter wine shopping spree

Going on a leisurely cruise to France in search of amazing wine that's being sold for a song seemed like a brilliant idea last summer, when the plan was hatched. But it's November now, and with the enormous raindrops hurling themselves against our windscreen, and the man from Met Éireann promising gales and tormented seas for the ferry crossing from Rosslare to Cherbourg, it doesn't seem quite so brilliant.

We pull into a windswept Rosslare Harbour and join a small queue of cars crammed with furniture and miserable-looking people waiting for the Stena Line ship to depart.

Ferry crossings at the height of summer are said to be jolly affairs, with face painters and parties for children. Our winter crossing is less jolly. There are no face painters, no happy children or parents with smiling eyes. Just morose truckers drinking cider with whiskey chasers and feeding money into poker machines. Bryan O’Brien and I spend 90 seconds taking in the ferry’s other delights. Then we join the truckers.

Beat the taxman

Our mission is to beat the taxman. The Republic has the highest duty on wine in the EU, at €3.48 a bottle. Duty on wine has jumped by 62 per cent in two years, and now more than half of the cost of a €9 bottle of wine in Ireland is tax.

More than 80 per cent of all the wine in the Republic costs between €8 and €12 a bottle. When all taxes are added, they make up €4.28 of the price of the cheapest bottle; another €3.20 goes on distribution and packaging, leaving just 52c for the wine. A €12 bottle of wine attracts €5.02 in tax and €4.80 in other costs, meaning the wine costs just €2.18.

If we travel to France and buy wine for personal use we’ll be relieved of the need to pay duty and much of the distribution cost. The cost of the trip, over and back, will be €500, and we plan to spend €1,000 on wine. Then we’ll be quids in.

We have booked a cabin, but it's not yet 10pm, so we play cards and watch Friends on a small television in the bar. We wander out on deck, but the rain, wind and swell drive us back indoors. When we eventually reach our cabin the rough seas rock us to an uneasy sleep.

Dawn breaks. We’ve had dinner, been to the bar, played cards, slept and had breakfast, and there’s still six hours before we dock in Cherbourg.

Some of our fellow travellers have brought their own food. A man beside me in the bar forks a breakfast of tuna from a tin into his mouth, accompanied by unbuttered white bread. He looks so sad that I want to give him a hug.

The wine had better be amazing.

Tight turnaround

When we dock the cameraman makes a song and dance about setting up the satnav. “We don’t want to get lost. The turnaround is very tight,” he says. He’s right. We have to get off the boat, find the wine shops, buy the wine, load it into the boot and get back on the boat in less than four hours.

An alternative would be to stay overnight in Cherbourg, but that would add hotel accommodation and the cost of feeding and entertaining ourselves for 48 hours into the equation, and the purpose of our trip is to save money.

Eventually he gets the satnav working. “Drive 500 metres,” it says in a Derry accent. We do. “You have reached your destination,” it says unexpectedly.

Our destination is a giant Carrefour supermarket. I knew it was close but didn’t expect it to be this close. And I didn’t expect it to be in a straight line from the port. I feel a pang of guilt for making the cameraman buy the satnav. Still, it should come in handy when we’re looking for the other wine shops.

The Carrefour is vast, and two wide aisles are given over to booze. There are hundreds of wines, ranging in price from less than €2 to well over €500. There’s no tasting on offer, and no one to ask about what we should buy, so we try our luck elsewhere.

Everyone says Normandie Wines is the place to go. I give the cameraman the address. He keys it into the satnav. We start driving. “You have reached your destination,” the Derry woman tells us almost immediately. The shop is across the road from the supermarket. The satnav is looking like a bad investment.

Normandie Wines is unpromising from the outside. It’s small, and the windows are heavily barred. It’s a different story inside.

Wines from more than 40 regions are stacked high along four narrow aisles. There are, perhaps, 100 varieties of red, maybe 80 whites and one small aisle devoted to bubbles. The wines range in price from about €2 to more than €50.

“Most people buy the wines for between €3 and €5,” says Denis Moulin, its manager. “That is how you make the biggest savings. It is because of the taxes, you see. They are very high in Ireland, no? We get a lot of Irish coming in looking for wine for a big party or a wedding or just for themselves. We have a lot of people who come back again and again.”

You might think it impossible to produce a good wine that sells at €4, but it isn’t in France. The wines in the range are perfectly acceptable – and would easily set you back €12 at home. Wines that sell here for €9.50 cost more than €25 at home.

Moulin tells me that people from Ireland tend to spend “anywhere between €500 and €1,000. If you have come such a long way you might as well stock up, no?”

A couple of other Irish people are in the shop. They’re delighted to talk but reluctant to be identified. “We’re planning to buy 700 bottles,” one man from Dublin says. “They should last us a couple of years. And coming up to Christmas we’ll go through a fair bit, with presents and the like for neighbours and family.”

A trucker from Co Meath interrupts us. Unlike us, he hasn’t come over just to stock up; he’s just passing through. “I didn’t come up in the truck, because I didn’t want this guy to get too excited,” he says, pointing at Moulin. “I buy a lot of wine. Most of it is for my daughters. They’re terrible for the drink; they take after their mother that way.”

We have time to kill, so we stop off at Cave Mancel. It’s posher than Normandie Wines. “We used to get a lot of Irish people in past years, but with the economic crisis the numbers have fallen, and now we get very few,” Sophie Mancel, its owner, says. “I think the boat is expensive, and that is putting many people off. We don’t sell cheap wines. Our focus is on quality wines.”

We buy some and return to the boat. All told we’ve spent about €1,200 on wine. It would set us back €3,200 at home.

Getting into the car is a chore, but the ferry back is a breeze, because the weather is better and we are better at managing our time.

It has taken less than 48 hours to save €2,000. Is it worth it? Absolutely. The only downside is that we have to drink all the wine now.