‘I’m runnin’ dry juicy’                               2min read

It’s much easier to start something than to end it & even harder to pause it.

We began our wine nights in an effort to bring something new & delicious to Limerick. Our focus with wine has been on low intervention, natural wine & growers who are producing something delicious in a different way.

We wanted to showcase wine in a similar way to how we offer our coffee - serve as delicious as possible, have a range of offerings set in a casual environment & let the juice do the talking.

We love wine. We love offering it, drinking it & take great satisfaction from giving you something different & delicious.

The hard reality is we cannot run a business just on love. We need people & we need enough of them to consistently come in & spend money.

We made a loss without taking food costs into consideration, which I am kindly pretending broke even (although wastage & the prices for the quality products we used would make that difficult). I am also not factoring in electricity costs etc.

The loss was calculated over 22 weeks for wine costs vs sales & factored in 6 hours labour per shift for a single employee. We did run our evenings over a further 8 weeks but numbers were skewed by Christmas time, hamper sales & retail.

It is not so much making a loss that is the difficult part. 30 weeks is not enough time to really know if it would have been viable. There are ways to mitigate that loss, ways to get out of the red. We are lucky that our day time trade is steady enough to allow us to try offering wine. The difficult part is the mental games you play with yourself. Yes, we all know Limerick does not have a decent population living in the city. The shop is off the beaten track. We do not have a light above the premises. Our advertising was lack lustre. Perhaps if we just kept at it, it may take off. We believe that refocusing on coffee & events will be of greater benefit to Rift than trying to make evening’s profitable long term. We will continue doing evening time events, private bookings for occasions & interesting talks & tastings.

We want to give our love for wine & food its own home & we will aim for this in time but for now I just want to say thank you to everyone who came in & enjoyed themselves. We will continue to work on a plan to offer you what we believe Limerick needs. We’re just pausing for now.