Berry Brothers & Rudd’s wine store in Lee Gardens, Causeway Bay

Regular visitors to the UK will be only too aware that Heathrow Airport is the earthly equivalent of a particularly unpleasant corner of hell.

It used, however, to have one little oasis of pleasure – the duty free outlet of the venerable London wine merchants Berry Brothers & Rudd. Long before it became obligatory to turn up at the airport several hours early in order to go through an exhausting series of security processes, I used to do that voluntarily to enjoy some quality browsing time and to pick up a couple of choice bottles.

Alas no more. Berry Brothers have gone from Terminal Four, and when chairman Simon Berry passed through town recently on his way home from Japan he explained to me the background to their withdrawal.

“I miss Heathrow,” he sighed over a cold beer in The Bar at The Peninsula. “The problem was that BAA [the British Airports Authority] was both our landlord and our competitor, which was not a healthy place to be.”

According to Berry, the company and BAA had various disagreements, and eventually it was decided to make a strategic withdrawal with a view to perhaps returning later under more favourable arrangements.

“We thought, ‘When we go it will take six months and they’ll be asking us to come back.’ Then, the week after we shut our final shop there, somebody tried to blow up a plane with something inside a bottle, and suddenly liquids were banned on planes. Everybody said to me ‘What brilliant timing’, but actually it was a disaster. Their sales collapsed, but everybody said ‘It’s because of the terrorists’ – not because they can’t run a wine shop,” he recalls ruefully.

Nevertheless for Berry Brothers and Rudd, founded in London in 1698 on premises they still occupy at 3 St James’s Street, the Heathrow experience had been a strategic milestone. It marked the beginning of the company’s expansion into overseas markets. It turned out that a great many of their airport customers were returning to Hong Kong, and their first branch outside the UK, accordingly, was established here. Now they are working on broadly similar lines to build up their Japanese business.

“We’ve sold a lot of whisky there over the years, and had our own whisky distribution company that was supplying the top hotels and restaurants with extremely rare and precious bottles of old stuff.  We also had our own office in London looking after our Japanese customers, but we were very much at arm’s length as far as the private customers were concerned, and with a spirits mentality so far as the on trade was concerned,” Berry explains.

The whisky company was jointly owned by Bacardi, to which Berry Brothers sold their interest, having decided instead to build up their customer base of wine lovers and open a Tokyo office.

“What it is going to evolve into I don’t know, in the same way we didn’t know what the Hong Kong office was going to evolve into, but one thing that we’ve learned is that it is quite a good idea, even in a market you think you know quite well, to go out there and find out if you fit,” Berry says.

Although Berry Brothers has – indeed cultivates – very much the image of an “old fashioned” wine merchant, the company has not stayed in business for more than three centuries without looking to the future. It was prescient in seeing the long term potential of Hong Kong as a fine wine market 10 years ago, and Berry sees Asia as central to the company’s future. An office in Shanghai is monitoring the China market, ready, when the time is right, to establish the first Berry Brothers and Rudd retail outlet on the mainland.

“By and large we tend to look east rather than west,” he says. “It just seems that we fit here better than we do in the States. You look at the labyrinthine laws that you get in America, with every single state having a different law, and then you look at what’s going on here in Hong Kong, where you have a government enlightened enough to say, ‘If we remove the taxes we remove the bureaucracy, and that’s a good thing’.”

Like their competitors, Berry Brothers experienced a major surge in orders from Hong Kong when the suspension of wine tax was announced, but according to Berry many of the company’s regular customers are still opting to cellar their wine in the company’s UK storage facilities.

Notwithstanding the success of Crown Wine Cellars, Hong Kong, he believes, still lacks sufficient storage space of a standard to keep wine in the optimum conditions on which Berry Brothers have always insisted.

UK storage, he argues, is still cheaper, although fears that some British wine merchants may go bust in the current recession have prompted some Hong Kong wine lovers to bring their cellars closer to home.

“I’ve always said that if only people bought from solid wine merchants in the first place they wouldn’t have to worry about them disappearing off the face of the earth,” observes Berry.

“We’re not going to go anywhere. If you’ve got wine with some curious company that has sold it at a very cheap rate, I’d get it out to Crown as fast as you possibly can, but as far as we’re concerned we’ve just opened a new warehouse, having doubled the size of our old one only about four or five years ago, and that is there for customers’ private reserves.  Until they sort out the storage [in Hong Kong] there is no point in bringing it here in bulk. Just move what you need for the next three to six months,” he says.

Even in financially hard times, Berry believes people will continue to buy fine wine, both for consumption and investment purposes. Unlike the hugely complex financial instruments that got the global economy into the mess we are all currently in – not fully understood, it transpires, even by the people who created and sold them – wine, he argues, has the great merit of simplicity.

“The question is, is it good to drink? Some of it is unbelievably good to drink, and it is going to appeal to people who are very rich and want the best. Unfortunately, if it is that good to drink there isn’t going to be very much of it, therefore it is going to go up. Prices may dip, but they’ll come back up. Nothing has fundamentally changed about it.  The good news is that for those who can’t afford the very best, the next best and the best after that continue to get better and better. There is more really delicious drinkable wine around now than there ever has been,” he says.

The future of the market in Asia depends, in Berry’s view, to a very large extent on education - one reason the company established its Fine Wine School which, he stresses, is intended solely to improve customers’ understanding of the subject, and not as a marketing tool, in line with which the school has arranged talks on subjects wholly unrelated to its own business, such as buying wine at auction.

“It’s all about trust,” Berry reflects. “The minute people look at wine education and mix it up with promotion, it goes wrong. If you use it simply to educate, and in that process, without worrying about how many bottles you directly sell, build up the authority that allows people to trust you, then it seems to work very well.”

With wine tax gone – at least for the time being – even without the Berry Brothers’ outlets at Heathrow, one can drop into the company’s Lee Gardens shop and buy many of the same wines for about the same price, but it would be nice to see them airside again somewhere. The wine and spirits offerings at Chek Lap Kok, for example, remain dismally uninspiring and uncompetitively priced.

“We were at Heathrow for 12 years, and it turned us into an international name,” Berry says. “Now we’re beginning to go to the markets where we know our customers are – but we’re open to offers. We’ll come here if you like.”