Two or three times a year I spend a morning beneath Buckingham Palace with the chairmen of Britain’s two oldest wine merchants, choosing wine for the Queen’s cellar. That’s the sort of thing you do if you are Hew Blair of Justerini & Brooks and Simon Berry of Berry Bros & Rudd. These venerable companies face each other across St James’s Street off Piccadilly, quietly doing their damnedest to prise more money out of the well-heeled and bibulous than the other. For well over two centuries they have done battle in the British marketplace but nowadays their immaculately tailored sales teams are just as likely to be jostling for orders in Hong Kong and Singapore too.
Family-owned Berrys, ever the innovator, also has a branch in Tokyo and has flirted with outposts in Dublin and Heathrow. It was the first UK wine merchant to invest – in 1994, digital pre-history – in its own (comprehensive) website, to establish its own online fine wine trading platform, to become an accomplished book (and ebook) publisher, to run its own wine school and to operate a fully fledged corporate events space in the recently renovated and atmospheric cellars of its extensive freehold premises a stone’s throw from St James’s Palace.
Juster