As the Ireland rugby team travels to Bordeaux, in France, for the World Cup, Mike Gerrard
visits the region and discovers how wine has connected the two countries for centuries. Photography by Donna Dailey

Why, you might ask, is there an International Museum of Wine in Kinsale? The town is, admittedly, in a county named Cork, and there are a few wineries in the area. But you could fi t all the grapevines in Ireland onto little more than a couple of rugby pitches. It’s not a country exactly renowned for its award-winning chardonnays and merlots.

However, Ireland does have a long involvement in the wine trade. When the rugby team and fans arrive in Bordeaux for the start of the Rugby World Cup ­ they face Namibia there on 9 September ­ perhaps supporters should consider switching from Guinness, and toast the team instead with a glass or two of Château Margaux or Mouton-Rothschild?

For it was the Irish who helped to make the Bordeaux wine trade what it is today. It’s the second-largest grape-growing region in the world, according to Financial Times wine writer Jancis Robinson. And, with 800 million bottles of wine produced there every year, only Languedoc in southern France is bigger. That should see even the Irish fans safely through the World Cup.

It can all be traced back to the “Winegeese” ­ no, not a strange type of migrating bird, but a group of migrating Irishmen. Ireland, like England, had always been a great wine and brandy importing country. They couldn’t grow it but they certainly liked to drink it. The sherry and Champagne industries thrived on their British and Irish exports.

The Irish have been drinking Bordeaux for as long as they’ve been drinking the black stuff. But it wasn’t all one-way traffi c. The Winegeese fl ew south from Ireland, and many of them landed in Bordeaux.

They got their name from the “Wild Geese”, the Irish migrants of the 17th and 18th centuries, birds migrating from their homeland for all kinds of reasons. Many well-to-do Irish left in the Flight of the Earls after the Battle of Kinsale in 1601, when English forces defeated Hugh Roe O’Donnell and Hugh O’Neill. Some left because of the increasing anti-Catholic laws. Others were simply economic migrants, seeking a better life elsewhere.

The Winegeese were specifi cally the families who left and then got involved in the wine trade in the countries they settled in, like Germany, Italy, Spain and France. The official start of the Winegeese migration was 1691, the year after the Battle of the Boyne, when Irish Catholics thought it was time to leave, if they knew what was good for them. Almost 25,000 of them left for France alone in that fi rst year. And many of them settled in Bordeaux working in the wine business.

A man from Skibbereen in Cork, Abraham Lawton, became the most important wine- broker in Bordeaux, and hence the most important man in the city. A Fermanagh man, Thomas Barton, was soon the leading wine shipper in Bordeaux, while Nathaniel Johnston from Armagh had cellars that held six million bottles.

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