Frank Mannion’s new feature documentary A Sip of Irish – which celebrates Ireland’s contribution to the world of food and drink – is in UK cinemas from this weekend with a special screening at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith this Sunday.
The film features Sligo-born London publican Oisín Rogers of The Devonshire in Soho, head pastry chef at Ballymaloe House in Cork JR Ryall, UK wine writer Oz Clarke, dancer turned whiskey entrepreneur Michael Flatley from Chicago, Jameson Whiskey blender Deirdre O’Carroll from Limerick, Irish American winemaker Bo Barrett of Napa Valley’s Chateau Montelena, Omagh-born New Zealand actor and wine maker Sam Neill, Tipperary’s actor Pat Shortt and singer Una Healy, and presenter Laura Whitmore from Dublin among others.
A Sip of Irish was filmed at The Devonshire in Soho as well as Midleton Distillery, Killahora Orchards and Ballymaloe House – all in Cork – and Ballyfin in Laois.
London-based film maker Frank Mannion, from Carlow, told us last year about his documentary, Quintessentially Irish which featured actors Pierce Brosnan, Andrew Scott and Jeremy Irons, President Michael D Higgins, Bob Geldof, jockey Rachael Blackmore, GAA commentator Marty Morrissey, Olympic champion Usain Bolt, Prince Albert of Monaco, and many others.
Frank spoke to The Irish World about his new film.
Q: We can see how this film grew out of Quintessentially Irish with its mentions of how the Irish helped create the Bordeaux wine industry…
“Exactly, I liked the story of the ‘wine geese’ which I covered in a cursory way in Quintessentially Irish. Researching the ‘wine geese’, everyone told me to film at the Medoc Marathon, which is known as the world’s slowest marathon because there are 34 wine stops on the way and it’s not the cheap plonk, it is the amazing Medoc chateaux of which five or six are Irish in origin – Chateau McCarthy, Chateau Leoville Barton, Chateau Lynch-Bages, all Irish families.
“Just to have a wine called Chateau McCarthy is crazy, but it’s really good stuff.
“I wanted to explore that because it’s very easy to reduce Irishness to the five or six million people living on the island of Ireland, but I wanted to look at the 82 million diasporas across all continents and what they have been doing.
“For instance, Bo Barrett of Chateau Montelena in Napa Valley is a classic American man but he also sees himself as Irish American because his grandparents emigrated and lived the American dream.
“He’s very proud of that story.
“It also shows what the diaspora have gone on to do.”
A Sip of Irish screened at the recent Cannes Film Festival.
“It went down very well because it shows, in some cases, stuff that people didn’t know – the Irish wine, the Bailey’s farm, Muff Liquor.
“Pat Shortt says his favourite drink is Scraggy Bay (India Pale Ale beer) with which I wasn’t familiar, but it just shows how adventurous our palates are now.
“When you go to the duty free, all the big names are there but there are also an unbelievable number of new gins and other liquors.
“It’s great to see how healthy the market is for Irish products.
“I’m always interested in the origins of drinks.
“Jameson is by far the biggest selling Irish whiskey worldwide – but it was set up by John Jameson, a Scotsman.
“Bailey’s Irish cream has nothing Irish about it apart from the cream, because it was invented by an Englishman called Tom Jago and a South African man.
“They were asked to find a drink that would have milk in it because there was so much excessive milk in Ireland in the ‘70s that having a liqueur drink that had milk or cream at its core, if it were successful, would be a great way of finding a means to use this milk mountain.
“As a reward for winning the pitch Tom Jago made a deal that all revenues from Baileys Original Irish Cream would be exempt from tax for 10 years.
“If you think of the millions of bottles that Baileys sold in those first 10 years where no money went back to the Exchequer but after 10 years, of course, they’ve sold in excess of something like 2 billion bottles now, so the Irish Exchequer is a big winner from Baileys.”
The film starts with a dairy farmer making Baileys Original Irish Cream (the makers don’t use an apostrophe) showing more of the story behind the drink everyone knows…
“With Baileys what impressed me was, and this goes for all Irish dairy farmers, they’re very proud of what their cows produce.
“If you go to America, you see ‘grass-fed meat’ and they make a big deal that it’s grass-fed whereas in Ireland all we ever had is grass-fed meat, the best meat in the world.
“With Baileys, it was just finding this amazing farmer in Tinahely, County Wicklow, Joe Hayden, who has been making the cream for Bailey’s for over 20 years.
“I was really impressed with their farming, their techniques and their care.
“I thought I made a great discovery with Joe, but he said, ‘Oh my God, you’ve just missed it. We had the Real Housewives of Orange County visiting last month’.
“The Real Housewives of Orange County took off the stilettos and put on the wellies and went around the farm and were talking about how their Ferraris would get splashed with cow dung if they had to live on Joe’s farm.”
Q: You filmed at Oisin Rogers’ Soho pub The Devonshire which sells 20,000 pints of Guinness a week – the world record…
“The Irish pub is the great institution both at home and abroad.
“I thought, ‘Okay, well maybe I should explore The Stags Head in Dublin or some of the other very famous pubs, The Brazen Head.
“But I thought let’s explore one of the 7,000 Irish pubs that are abroad because there are now more Irish pubs abroad than in Ireland where pubs are closing.
“The phenomenon of marketing Irishness through Irish pubs was interesting to me, especially in the hands of Oisín Rogers.”
Q: There’s a misconception you can’t get good Guinness outside Ireland – but you show Rory Guinness (the 55-year-old, Kildare-born, fourth Earl of Iveagh and the current head of the Guinness dynasty) being very impressed by Oisín’s porter…
“That’s right.
“At the end of this year Guinness are opening a huge new facility in Covent Garden and it’s only 200 metres from The Devonshire.
“Once that opens, it’s going to take Guinness to a whole new level.
“There is a science to the perfect pint of Guinness but those publicans who care and want repeat business are the ones who make sure that they get the basics right when it comes to pouring a pint of Guinness.
“Oisín (56) has, like many Irish publicans, great pride in what he’s serving.
“He’s proud of what he does.
“There’s an older Covent Garden connection to Guinness.
“Arthur Guinness famously saw (London) porter, as it was called at the time, with the porters of Covent Garden. That was his inspiration.
“He came back to St James’s Gate (the four-acre site he acquired on a 9,000-year lease for £45-a-year) and did his own version of porter or stout which became Guinness.
“We are an island nation, a nation of outside influences – that’s what the film is showing, that we’re not narrow minded, we’re very open minded, receptive to others and very receptive to ideas.
“There’s been a 300-year period of amazing entrepreneurship in the drinks and culinary world in Ireland.”
You tell the story of Oisín Rogers restoring The Devonshire as a pub and being quite romantic about it…
“That is a classic immigrant story.
“I’ve been living in London for 20 years and I get nostalgic about things that are gone, cinemas that have closed, so I like that this was a pub that had The Pogues having sessions there.
What I loved about Oisín is the detail of that restoration and psychology of the pub – he has nailed it so, so well. There’s a great sense of pride about how he restored the pub and it’s an amazing success. It doesn’t matter what time of day, even if it’s raining, there are a hundred people standing outside because it’s full inside.”
Donegal’s Muff Liquor Company also features in your film…
“Muff Liquor is a great story. The lady who runs it is a real entrepreneur who managed to build up a cult following during the pandemic, through social media, because of its name.
“The average tourist to Ireland will go to the Guinness Storehouse, possibly will go to the Midleton Distillery, but places like Muff Liquor are amazing as well and their tourists’ hub is so Instagrammable – purely because of its name.
“Russell Crowe’s an investor, and Ronan Keating.
“Their vodka is made from potatoes – the best vodka is from potatoes.”
Q: You could have made a film all about Irish wine on its own, couldn’t you?
“Yes, that could have been a story on its own and a surprising story. We feature Dermot Sugrue from Kilmallock in County Limerick who trained with the Bartons in Bordeaux.
“He found English wine as his passion, so he put the knowledge that he learned with the Bordeaux producers into the manufacture of English sparkling wine.
“We have wine writer Oz Clarke saying the best sparkling wine in the world is Dermot Sugrue’s – an Irishman making English sparkling wine.”
Q: There’s also the story of the Cork man Richard Hennessy…
“Richard Hennessy was a soldier, an officer, who fought at the Battle of Fontenoy (in 1749 in what us now part of Belgium) against the English for the French.
“The English were defeated. He was injured. He retired and went to Charentes in Cognac at age 41 and set up Hennessy Cognac and had a huge success.
“England was his biggest market and still is to this day. It’s also big among rappers.”
Your film goes into the effect of the War of Independence and US Prohibition on the Irish alcohol business…
“The War of Independence, and Prohibition, were knock-out blows really for the Irish whiskey industry.
“Pre-prohibition Irish whiskey was the biggest selling whiskey in the US. During Prohibition American bootleggers were bringing in terrible Canadian whiskey, pretending it was Irish.
“It set back the reputation of Irish whiskey by about 50 years.
“When Prohibition ended, Scotch whisky got a foothold. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the Irish whiskey industry recovered.”
Your film also shows there is so much more to Irish food than stew…
“Those of us who live in Ireland take for granted the amazing, high standard of culinary excellence there is in every county.
“I wanted to pay tribute to the originator of that, Myrtle Allen at Ballymaloe House.
“She was a farmer’s wife in her 40s and set up a farm-to-fork operation in her house.
“Her neighbours thought she was mad, but people came from all over Europe because she was serving incredible local products which Irish people valued but it was only the foreign chefs and foreign wine writers and food writers who said, ‘This is amazing’.
“Every county has farm-to-fork places, but she was the real founder of the current wave of culinary excellence in Ireland.”
You spoke to celebrity chef-restaurateur Anna Haugh (whose Chelsea restaurant Myrtle is named after Allen) for your earlier film and for this one…
“I wanted to pay tribute to her because she told a story about how she has a corn dish from the Choctaw Indians.
“When during the Irish Famine that tribe heard Irish immigrants left Ireland because kids and everyone was starving, they sent hundreds of kilos of maize back to Ireland to feed the starving Irish.
“She has a dish that commemorates the Choctaw Indians.
“I wanted to get that story – oppressed people helping another oppressed nation thousands of miles away.”
What was the biggest surprise for you?
“I always knew the Guinness family had been amazing philanthropists in Ireland and Dublin but didn’t realise the extent to which. the Guinness family’s philanthropy was at a bigger scale in London.
“When Hampstead Heath was coming up for sale for redevelopment, Edward Cecil Guinness, who owned Kenwood House at the at the top of Hampstead Heath, bought the entire land of Hampstead Heath and gave it to the people of London.
“To this day, Hampstead Heath is there because a Guinness family member bought it not for himself but for the people of London to enjoy nature, that I did not know.”
Q: What kind of reactions did you get to your film Quintessentially Irish?
“When we showed it in places like Birmingham to older Irish immigrants in their 60s and 70s, it made them emotional about being Irish and nostalgic and homesick. That really surprised me.
“Generally, the reaction among the Irish was positive and emotional but also when we showed it in places like Copenhagen, and Dubrovnik, I was amazed at how many people love Ireland and not just Irish writing or literature – they innately love Ireland and Irish people.
“That surprised me, that there are millions of people out there with absolutely no family heritage and connection to Ireland and in some cases have never been to Ireland, who have a real grá for Ireland that has been built up over decades by us immigrants.”
- A Sip of Irish is in UK cinemas from 20 June including, on Sunday 22 June at 2.00 pm, a special screening at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith followed by a Q&A with Frank Mannion and Oisín Rogers. Tickets available here.
