Meet Mr. Wine

I met Theo Mungwariho at a solo art exhibition at the Heaven Restaurant in Kiyovu. Thin and raspy-voiced, he easily stood out from the rest of the crowd in his grey suit and pointed black shoes. The rest of the crowd was decked in smart casuals. In his grey suit, he became a spectacle in the middle of the exhibition hall, mixing cocktails in huge steel pans. He took frequent breaks to join a table and explain something about his cocktail, or sneak out for a cigarette break. Later when I caught up with him, he told me; “Don’t ask me about beer. I don’t know about beer.”MR WINEMr. Wine is the name I heard some guests call him during the exhibition. He had been contracted by the exhibiting artist to make budget cocktails for guests. This was just another gig he had scored as an itinerant wines and spirits dealer. It is what he does every day for a living, although this was a fat deal by his average standards. When he gets such a deal, he is happy. Otherwise, the other days he makes personal home deliveries of assorted wines and spirits to people’s doorsteps, the way the hawkers do. His clients usually call him up, place an order, and he will either walk or jump on a moto with it. Others simply walk or drive to his small wine shop in Gikondo. At the shop, he heads and employs a staff of two; one an accountant, the other an attendant. This leaves him with barely any room to delegate roles. At the art exhibition, he mixed the cocktails all by himself. Theo has been in the wine trade five years now. In 2008, after his high school, he found himself rooted at his parents’ home in Kigali, jobless and with no money to spend. After six months, he approached Eagle Mark Investments, the appointed Kenya Wine Agency distributor in Kigali for a casual job. He started as a freelance marketer in January of that year, but steadily rose through the ranks.“With this job, I shot two birds with one stone,” he says. “I learnt more about wine, and I learnt about marketing.” He pauses and then concludes; “I asked myself, why not apply these skills in my own business?”He is grateful for one other thing about that job. It is where he learnt all the fairly fluent English he speaks today. He had studied in French all through his primary and high school. “This has helped to ease all my marketing work, since I know all four major languages,” he says. He speaks French, English, Swahili and Kinyarwanda well. But just how does he market his wines? “I do marketing where the big companies can’t reach,” he boasts. “I go to the smallest bars, boutiques and shops. I also go to hotels. For hotels, I do consultancy on what wines to stock for their target market.”Currently, he supplies two supermarkets; La Source and Favcon supermarkets in Huye district. “People used to travel to Kigali to buy wines. Now I take it to them. I don’t care about the quantity.” Later, he told me he wants to graduate “from wine supplier to wine consultant here in Kigali”. So what does he know about wine? “Wine is culture. When people sit together, sharing wine, they can talk freely about life. Wine builds the country. I’m paying three different types of taxes; VAT, Pay As You Earn, and ümusoro ku nyungu.”He credits his wine shop for three things: Not only has he become better at relating with people, he has acquired a sense of self-management and charity. “I know what it means to help a brother or relative.” And his last words: “I want to go to a wine school …if it’s there. I want to learn more about wine.”

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Meet Mr. Wine