Two or three times a year I spend a morning beneath Buckingham Palace with the chairmen of Britain’s two oldest wine merchants, choosing wine for the Queen’s cellar. That’s the sort of thing you do if you are Hew Blair of Justerini & Brooks and Simon Berry of Berry Bros & Rudd. These venerable companies face each other across St James’s Street off Piccadilly, quietly doing their damnedest to prise more money out of the well-heeled and bibulous than the other. For well over two centuries they have done battle in the British marketplace but nowadays their immaculately tailored sales teams are just as likely to be jostling for orders in Hong Kong and Singapore too.
我每年都有那麼兩三次機會和英國兩家歷史最悠久葡萄酒公司的掌門人一起，花一個上午的時間到白金漢宮(Buckingham Palace)地下酒窖爲女王選酒。兩位執掌此事的名家分別是珍寶集團 (Justerini & Brooks)的休•布萊爾(Hew Blair)以及貝瑞兄弟(Berry Bros & Rudd)的西蒙•貝瑞(Simon Berry)。這兩間聲名顯赫的公司在聖詹姆士街(St James’s Street)隔街相對，與皮卡迪利(Piccadilly)大街近在咫尺，他們暗自開足馬力，爭相從名商巨賈和嗜酒之人的口袋裏攫取更多的利潤。在過去的兩百多年裏他們以英國本土爲主戰場，而如今建制精良的銷售團隊可能已經在搶奪香港和新加坡的訂單了。