So
PK has been on at me for ages, years, even, about Berry Bros. &
Rudd, legendary wine sellers of Piccadilly, established in the
seventeenth century, impossibly period retail premises, outrageous
client list (Lord Byron, the Aga Khan, Napoleon III, the British
Royal Family past and present), superlative knowledge of high-end
wines (eight
Masters of Wine working for them), history issuing from their
eighteenth-century headquarters like an invisible gas, a surprising
number of drinkable wines listed online for under a tenner, I mean,
he says, why wouldn't anyone get down to 3 St. James's Street, SW1,
and have themselves the heritage time of their lives and
come away laden with drink? 'Go on'
he concludes, 'you know you want to', the phrase he invariably uses
for anything I really don't want to do.
How
do I know I don't want to? Because I've been past the place plenty of
times and everything about it puts me off, apart from the facade and
a beetling covered alleyway next door which bears a plaque set on the
jamb of its entrance arch: In
this building was the legation from the Republic of Texas to the
Court of St. James 1842 - 1845.
Everything else
makes my blood run cold. And yet, just to shut PK up, I will give it
a go.
Give
it a go
is of course a relatively nuanced term. What it means in practice is
that I stand at the windows (like the poop of a Napoleonic ship of
the line, gnarled and lacquered with centuries of paint), peer inside
and see nothing that appears to be a shop. In one part of the building
there seems to be a sitting room, recently vacated by Beau Brummel or
Queen Mary; in another part there is a Georgian office or counting
house, a handful of scriveners seated at desks towards the rear of
the space. The window displays contain a handful of sullenly impressive wine bottles, each poised on a single metal stand like a
museum exhibit. There are no prices. Apart from the enigmatic bottles
in the windows and the legend Wine
Merchants
in quiet gold lettering, there is nothing to make the uncommitted
pedestrian believe that he is in fact passing a wine store. It might
as well be an antiques dealer. And although this particular
pedestrian knows that he is
passing a wine store, he does not stop and go in; he just keeps
moving. That's what the place is saying: nothing for you here,
nothing you could make sense of.
What
makes it worse is the fact that Berry Bros. & Rudd are not alone
in this act of deadly hauteur.
Next door is a shop owned by Dunhill, for the pleasure of extremely
serious cigar enthusiasts. When I peer, hobo-like, through its
window, all I see are three expensively-dressed men propping up a
counter, talking; in the window it says Cigar
Lounge;
there is a humidor; I move away.
And
on the other
side of Berry Bros. are two even greater villains: Lock, the hatters
(oldest hatmakers in the world, clients include Lord Nelson, Charlie
Chaplin, Jackie Kennedy, Winston Churchill) and Lobb the bootmaker
(Queen Victoria, Frank Sinatra, Churchill again). Lobb scarcely
announce themselves at all, their shopfront bare except for a couple
of By Appointments over the doorway and a dusty shelf in the window
bearing an assortment of single shoes, apparently dropped there by
chance, and an old cardboard box. In other words, I am faced, overall, with
about a hundred feet of pure retailing disdain. Why, exactly, am I
meant to feel good about this?
Yes,
I know that high-end shops like to make themselves inaccessible and I
understand that Berry Bros. aren't going to have a chalkboard outside
shouting about a supremely chuggable pinot grigio, just to get me in.
But there is a limit to the amount of patrician indifference I can
put up with, not least because in the modern, disintermediated,
world, Amazon (bless them) will supersubtly know what I want almost
before I know it myself and silently and efficiently get it to me
without my having to do anything more than caress my phone. Just the
idea
of an antiquated Piccadilly snob shop playing hard to get makes me
mad. And a wine shop at that! Where the whole transaction is already
rank with elitism, even in a high street outlet! What the
hell kind of world are we living in? What the hell kind of world is
PK
living in? Not for the first time, I tell myself that I must never,
ever, act on one of his suggestions again. Only this time I really, really, really
mean it.
CJ
You wuss CJ. I've been popping into Berry's ever since I was an 18 year old clutching a couple of recommendations from a book. I'm far from posh, but I was charmed (still am) by its historic façade, and entering the shop does feel like a welcome step back in time. It's actually nice that there isn't a ridiculously jocular message on a blackboard outside flogging some dubious plonk.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing in its defence is the welcome from the staff is warm and professional, I am never made to feel like an oik by their knowledgeable but unstuffy staff.
Listen to PK, it's a joy to visit Berry's, it's not like other merchants, and that's the point. Have a go, it may look inaccessible but it really isn't, and the wealth of lovely wines to browse through is joyous.
Well I take your point totally about my being a wuss. And I have to believe you when you talk about B.B. & R.'s staff & their warmth & professionalism. You do, of course, have a supporter in PK: who,I am fairly confident, is going to come back to this tangled topic before too long. Just saying...
ReplyDeletePopping into Berry's since an 18 year old, I am afraid puts Bex into an income bracket that, as a youthful 62 year old, I have sadly yet to attain. I shall keep trying but it is a long way to go from Lewes even with my discounted rail pass. And I should think the staff would be warm and helpful too. They are hardly likely to be surly when Betty Battenburg is a customer!
ReplyDeleteCouldn't have put it better myself - although I bet Lewes has got a few nice wine shops to keep the dedicated drinker happy; it's a very pleasant part of the world, as I recollect...
ReplyDeleteIndeed it does. Harveys brewery has an excellent wine store where, if one if feeling a just tad stingy, one can always walk away with a small selection of Sussex's finest ales. I fear Berry's might not be seeing me for quite a while, what with Southern Rail and all!
ReplyDelete