Berry Bros. & Rudd
THE SPIRITUAL HOME of oenophiles the world over, Berry Bros & Rudd is a bastion of tradition at once extremely grand and refreshingly accessible. Family-owned and managed since the late 17th century, it’s as clubbable as its near neighbours White’s, Brooks’s and Boodle’s. That’s fitting, as a significant number of its clients hail, now as ever, from one or other of those august institutions. Buy your booze here and you’re merely following in the footsteps of generations of English gentlemen who know a fine thing when they taste it. Yet one isn’t obliged to break the bank to add a chapter to the Berry Bros & Rudd story. A bottle of Good Ordinary Claret can be yours for as little as £12.
If you have time – make time if you don’t – I urge you to turn the corner from the shop on Pall Mall to explore the original premises at the bottom of St James’s Street. Suspended above two acres (yes, acres) of cellar space, they’re an almost laughably picturesque throwback to an earlier era, from the crooked wooden floors constructed from ships’ timbers to the framed letter from the White Star Line, regretfully informing the firm that a number of cases making their way to America aboard the Titanic had been irretrievably lost.
I fling the word ‘indispensable’ around willy-nilly in this book, but the Berry Bros & Rudd online order facility is precisely that: indispensable.
See also: Hedonism Wines
