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.
Justerinis prides itself on being a bit more conservative, which is strange since it is owned by Diageo and thus constitutes a sister brand to, say, Baileys, Blossom Hill and Piat d’Or. Blair himself admits that the company is a bit of a corporate anomaly. “Ninety nine per cent of the people in Diageo don’t know we exist. But then the people we buy from do know they’ll be paid.” Presumably what Diageo values most about Justerinis is the Royal Warrant that can be applied to J&B Scotch whisky. Justerinis, and Blair, are strong on Scotland. He is based there and has been a member of Scotland’s Royal Company of Archers (a ceremonial guard for the Queen) since 1985. His home in the Borders is surrounded by a mile of the River Leader so that he can “flick a fly while walking the dogs”.