There are two ways to react to the arrival of the London wine merchants Berry Bros & Rudd in Dublin. One is to snarl: another British outfit coming in and grabbing a slice of the Irish wine boom, grrrrr, hiss. The other is to drop into 4 Harry Street and give thanks that one of the finest Victorian buildings in the city centre has been spectacularly rescued, then furnished with decent wine. Either way, it seems that Irish Times readers are to some extent responsible.
A wine column I wrote in February 1997 about Berrys' creakingly ancient and extraordinary premises in St James's Street in London provoked an unexpected reaction. "You just wouldn't believe how many Irish customers we suddenly had, dropping in with that newspaper cutting in their hand," says Vickie Mackenzie, who was manager of the 300-year-old London shop at the time, and who is now helping to launch the Dublin venture. "People rang up, too, wanting to order wine. The Irish Times article was the thing that really got us moving on Ireland."
Moving - yes, but cautiously at first. Cabinteely wine merchant Peter Foley, who was already the agent for Berrys' famous Cutty Sark whisky, began to stock a dozen wines from the popular Berrys Own Selection range. Meanwhile Berrys' development director Ciaran Coakley - a Dubliner with Irish Distillers and Coras Trachtala on his CV - began to switch his gaze from Hong Kong and Japan to the economic miracle in his native land. Fields, a wholesale partnership between Berrys, Cassidy Wines and Foleys, was set up earlier this year. By then the old Weights and Measures Office in Harry Street had been identified as the perfect location for a shop.
"It was a complete pigsty when we saw it," Coakley recalls, "but we could immediately see that it had the right attributes. A cellar and great character." And a good location, he might have added - opposite the Westbury hotel, 70 yards from Grafton Street.
The building, listed inside and out, cried out for sensitive restoration. Working in association with Historic Heart of Dublin, Berrys' approach was both meticulous and strongly focused on Irish expertise, with Dublin architects McCrossan O'Rourke and the John Duffy Design Group of Monkstown co-ordinating the project. Craftspeople were sourced here to build pine shelf units out of pylons salvaged from Wexford harbour, lay the cellar floor of Donegal stone and refurbish the original fireplaces which stand at odd angles, giving the shop a cosy air. A striking central light, echoing the weights and measures theme (which, by the way, pervades St James's Street, too) was commissioned from young Dublin artist Shane Holland.
So, even if wine never passes your lips, it's worth dropping in just to see the place - the warm old bricks, the polished up measuring paraphernalia, the glowing red marble counters. It's a pleasant shop to mooch about in, with an all-Irish sales team headed up by Peter Foley. Berrys has also kept twitchy wine trade feathers unruffled by sourcing about half of their stock from Irish agents.
Once here, you'll probably seize on something to buy - if not for yourself, then for a friend. I can see this company's smart white and navy bottle bags arriving in droves at Dublin dinner parties - dressing up the bestselling Berrys Good Ordinary Claret (£6.50) if the do is a modest one, or handsomely encasing something like a Lucien Boillot Volnay 1995 (£23.70) if it's posh. The cellar area, intended for serious browsers, houses so many stunning wines in stellar vintages that just thinking about it makes me tremble too much to type.
Despite its traditional air, the oldest independent family wine merchant in the world is neither stuffy nor obsessively francophile. There are plenty of New World wines on offer - even in Berrys Own Selection, where prices start at under £7. (Don't be put off by the fact that these are non-vintage, by the way: they are blended to achieve a consistent style each year.) And while Spain, Portugal and Italy could be beefed up a bit, it's great to see due attention being paid to poor, downtrodden Germany. What's the reaction so far? "Terrific enthusiasm," says Vickie Mackenzie, who is in Harry Street until Christmas Eve. "In London, you know, the customers can be a bit stuffy - but here they're younger, more relaxed. There's an easy familiarity. I'm really enjoying cracking jokes."
While the city centre has acquired Berry Bros & Rudd, downtown Dalkey has gained On the Grapevine. If I wrote about every retail outlet springing up these days, there would be no room in the wine column for anything else - but this one was mentioned glowingly by so many suppliers that curiosity sent me south to check it out.
It just shows what the wine bug can do when it colonises a young couple. Last year, when they were married, Gabriel and Pamela Cooney had careers in top gear - he as marketing manager of Green Isle Foods, she as sales and marketing manager of the Radisson St Helen's Hotel. "But the whole corporate rat-race thing was getting to us," Pamela says. Wine, a shared interest adopted during work stints in France and Germany, presented an escape route.
Disciplined marketing graduates both, they did careful research, setting off from home in Glenageary to inspect wine shops every weekend. "We sat night after night outside Terroirs in Donnybrook - that was particularly inspiring." Well-heeled Dalkey could do with another outlet, they reckoned. The business plan was barely drafted when a brand new building caught their eye, close to the main street. They organised the shopfitting themselves and were still varnishing the floor at midnight before opening in a blaze of St Patrick's Day sunshine.
So far, so good. French wines, especially classics like Chablis, Sancerre and claret, are the best sellers by far among a comfortably off but fairly conservative clientele. "Especially at weekends," Gabriel notes. "French country wines, and wines from Chile and Argentina, do quite well during the week." Like the founders of Thomas Pink shirts in their Fulham Road days, the Cooneys have discovered that peak trading time in an affluent area is after office hours - so they stay open until at least 8 p.m. to catch the execs coming home on the DART.
So far, their stock is made up of about 400 wines from ten suppliers. There are plenty of temptations, starting with star champagnes (Krug, DP etc), Lynch-Bages 1995 (£74.99)
Palmer 1989 (£125) - no surprise, really, in the home territory of Bono, Neil Jordan and Chris de Burgh - and working down. For everyday drinking at everyday prices, the exciting Spanish, Italian and Southern French wines sourced by Searsons are a special strength.
Berry Bros & Rudd, 4 Harry Street, Dublin 2 - phone 01 6773444, fax 01 6773440, email sales@bbr.ie Open Monday-Saturday, 10.30 a.m.-7 p.m. with late opening Thursday until 8 p.m.
On the Grapevine, Unit B Castle Yard, St Patrick's Road, Dalkey, Co Dublin - phone 01 2353054, fax 01 2353059. Open Monday-Thursday 11 a.m.-8 p.m., Friday-Saturday 11 a.m.-9 p.m., Sunday 12.30-2 p.m. and 4-8 p.m.