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C.W. Berry,  A Miscellany of Wine (1932)

Charles Walter Berry was from a long line of wine merchants who owned and continue to own Berry Bros. & Rudd in St. James’s Street, Pall Mall. Founded in 1698 as a grocer’s and coffee seller, it is now the UK’s oldest family-run wine merchant, now standing at 8 generations, and they are one of the key suppliers of wines to the royal family.

Berry was passionate about upholding the family tradition, and he lived by the philosophy that a wine merchant should be ‘the closest link between those who make the wine and those who drink the wine’. However, he was also an innovator, travelling throughout France and Europe to source unique wines that fell outside the well-known regions of Bordeaux and Burgundy, and transforming his journeys into captivating books that helped to invent a whole new genre of wine literature.

Berry’s contemporary and fellow pioneer of wine-writing Herbert Walter Allen said of him:

‘There are not a great many men to be found who know as much about wine, its subtle beauties and its delicate delights, as C. W. Berry; and all his knowledge, appreciation and generosity are at the disposal of his friends. There is a free masonry among wine-lovers. In that goodly fellowship the man who by some divine chance has unearthed a rare and precious bottle is at once preoccupied with an anxious thought: he feels that he owes it to a noble wine to share it with some other wine-lover worthy to enjoy its quality and able to discuss its peculiar merits. Selfishness is a vice unknown to the wine-lover, but there are few worshipers of Baccus so desperate in their generosity as the author of Viniana…’

The Menzies Collection contains a whole section of books on wine, which appears to have been Menzies’s favourite drink alongside whiskey (Menzies’s bookplate, which is imprinted on hundred of books throughout the Collection, even showcases a glass of wine). Three of those wine books are from Berry: Viniana, In Search of Wine: A Tour of the Vineyards of France, and A Miscellany of Wine. The latter two contain personal messages from the author including such evocative phrases as ‘Flow Wine, Smile Woman and the Universe is consoled’, and ‘O how good is God that gives us of this excellent juice!’.

The one book that is clearly dated was gifted in 1938 during the era when Menzies made several trips to England as Attorney-General, and there seems to have been a concerted effort on the part of Berry to ingratiate himself with Menzies, presumably because he was such a good customer. The volumes stand as testimony to Menzies’s passion for a good drop, but also as evidence of his liberality in an era when many conservative Protestant politicians were still engaged with the temperance movement and Victoria in particular had very strict liquor laws.