New wine in old bottles

Lucinda Baring

23 May 2009

Lucinda Baring meets Simon Berry, chairman of a 200-year-old company that’s more modern than it looks

Berry Bros & Rudd in St James’s Street epitomises the idea of an old-fashioned wine merchant. Outside, the façade has remained largely unchanged for centuries. Inside, the panelling, desks and uneven wooden floor transport you to an era long gone. And yet this venerable appearance belies the efficient mechanisms of a much more modern business. Other family-run wine merchants have been less successful in updating their brand. Lay & Wheeler, a 150-year-old family business very similar to Berry Bros and perhaps their closest competitor, was bought by Majestic in March, and Avery’s of Bristol, established in 1793, is now owned by Laithwaites. Earlier this month, Berry Bros itself announced it was closing its Dublin shop after ten years due to high costs.

Can Berry Bros in London survive and keep its independence? Despite the perception that a traditional family firm is incapable of competing with more progressive models, chairman Simon Berry assures me Berry Bros is going from strength to strength. ‘It is always assumed that a family-run business must be archaic,’ he tells me. That’s an easy assumption to make, especially when the chairman himself is an affable gent dressed in a pinstripe suit and we’re sitting in his panelled study behind the shop. ‘The truth is that the company regenerates with every generation. We may give the impression of an “old boys’ club” but the new boys bring new ideas.’

There has been a Berry or a Rudd at the helm here since 1810. No. 3 St James’s Street started as a grocery shop, opened by the Widow Bourne in 1668. In 1754, her grandson, William Junior Pickering, took on John Clarke as his partner, and Clarke’s daughter married John Berry, a wine merchant from Exeter; when her father died in 1788, he left the shop to his infant grandson, George Berry. George’s name was emblazoned on the shop in 1810, and when he died in 1854, his sons, George and Henry, became the first Berry brothers to run the company, which remained unchanged for another 90 years.

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