A Berry good show all round

This review was first published in May 2000

Wine bars are the country cousins of the restaurant and bar world, marooned in a variety of time warps. Davys's bars, for example, are locked into the sawdust and quaint spellings of a lost Johnsonian London; El Vino and Balls Bros provide clubby environments for the clubless; Don Hewitson's Cork and Bottle or the Hanover Square Wine Bar seem destined to swing and groove forever. Odd, really. Wine has become our national drink, but its complexities and subtleties still defeat big players like Bass (All Bar One markets and sells wine as just another bottled product, a sort of grape lager). When bar innovators like Oliver Peyton get serious about wine, meanwhile, they tend to make a restaurant in which to do it, and that pushes prices up.

No matter. It leaves plenty of room in the wine-bar world for simple, one-man-band enthusiasm, and the untrendy, happily, is rarely overpriced. People such as Chris Haynes can set up somewhere like Berries, offering a terrific service to those thirsty for better wines than usual, and his wine-loving customers can get on and enjoy it without fear that it will be hyped, cloned, branded, chained, themed and eventually destroyed.

Haynes has spent a lifetime working in wine bars for other people; now he has one of his own. If you fancy a bottle of Premier Cru Burgundy with some lunch and would still like change from £30, then this is one of the places you'll get it.

How's it done? Haynes has set up what he calls his "wine collection" at the back of the wine bar. This little cellar vault is stocked with serious wines, and invites a browse. Pick a bottle off the shelf, and you pay a wine-merchant's price plus £2.50 corkage; sommelier Patrick Guillou is on hand to offer advice if you wish. For £9.95, you can eat as much as you like from the simple but well-prepared buffet (which included fresh asparagus, chorizo and some excellent cheeses on the day I called).

This isn't a new idea: the Reynier Wine Library at 43 Trinity Square EC3 has offered a similar service for years, as does La Réserve at 56 Walton Street, SW3. I've always wondered why a larger chain didn't have a go at doing this, and recently the Warrington-based chain Wine Cellar Cafés has taken the plunge (there are London branches at 41 Horseferry Road, SW1, 268 High Street Orpington and 270-274 Upper Richmond Road West, East Sheen), though with sometimes mixed success - the Sevenoaks branch recently closed. It does work best, perhaps, when driven by individual enthusiasm and care.

Of the four bottles we tried, three were an unqualified success. Particularly good was the white 1998 Châteauneuf-du-Pape of Mont-Redon for £12 plus corkage: fat, supple, almost sweet-edged, full of fascinatingly soft seed and summer-fruit flavours (18/25). The '95 Marlbrook from Klein Constantia (£10.90 plus corkage) was intense and surprisingly claret-like (17/25), while the '95 Hauts de Smith, the second wine of Smith-Haut-Lafitte in Pessac-Léognan, disbursed smoke and chocolate to delicious effect (£19.95 plus cork-age, 19/25). Only a rather mean-flavoured 1998 Pouilly-Fumé from Château de Tracy (£12.50 plus corkage) let the side down (12/25). A normal wine bar functions at Berries in the evenings, and in the front half of the cheerfully painted basement at lunchtime, with wines sold off a list and by the glass at conventional prices.

I tried all of those on offer by the glass, and feel that Chris Haynes has work to do in improving the whites, all three of which were a little stringy and raw; none could truly be recommen- ded. Of the five reds on offer, though, an inexpensive Merlot from Aude offered good value at £2.70 for 175ml (15/25); while there were two outstanding choices for a little more.

Haynes has moved niftily to get hold of some stock of the 1997 Marquès de Murieta 2100 Coleccion, a softly earthy Rioja, deliberately lightly filtered, which has proved so popular in the States that it's almost impossible to find here (£3.75 a glass, 19/25). The `99 Terrazas de los Andes Malbec, an Argentinian red grown 1,067 metres up in the Andes by Champagne giants Mo't et Chandon, is excellent too: suppler than many, with expressive tar and meat flavours and fine lingering intensity (£3.50 a glass, 20/25).

Little touches (like pot pourri in the bright and clean male toilets) underline the efforts that Haynes has put in to making his wine bar, situated next door to Blackfriars Station, a place of quiet excellence.

Berries
167 Queen Victoria Street, EC4 V4DF