With a fascinating business, a beautiful Georgian office overlooking Mountjoy Square, some fine bottles of wine laid down in the former kitchens, and regular foreign travel in the course of his work, you would wonder why Mr Peter Wallis is retiring as managing director of the old-established wine importers, Edward Dillon and Co.

But when he tells you he has signed on to do his yacht master's, his wine diploma and wants to learn about building ("as in DIY"), you can see he's not going to be idle. Then he adds as an afterthought: "I haven't made up my mind as to whether I'm going to be employed again. I will take time to smell the roses and see how the land is lying."

Not that changing jobs, lifestyles or even countries is anything new to him. The son of a Dublin grain merchant, he was educated in England - "You went where your parents sent you," - and joined the British Army in 1957. He got a commission and spent time in Cyprus, Libya and Germany. It was the beginning of an odyssey that took him to several countries at a fascinating time in their development, and found him a South African wife, Noo, and a second home in the Cape.

In 1960 he joined the British Colonial Service. There followed several years in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, some of the time on "a fairly nice bush station" near the border with the Congo. "The day the Congo went up we were playing cricket. Nobody believed the Congo had gone up until we saw the refugees. Communications were quite difficult."

"Education was quite good then; most kids in Northern Rhodesia has an opportunity of going to school. There was a system employing local people to keep roads open. The tax collection system encouraged people to enter the cash economy." The ambitious hopes he and others had for the independent Zambia did not materialise. He became chief civil servant in the North-West province. "Kenneth Kaunda, whom I thought highly of at the time, was in power then. I got to know him quite well."

By 1968, he decided it was time to move on. "A white face, a colonial history, a colonial past. It was more suited to qualified Africans." So in 1968 he joined the Zambian National Tourist Board. It was a difficult time: Southern Rhodesia had declared independence unilaterally, all Zambian airports were closed to flights from Rhodesia, and South African or Rhodesian tourists could enter the country only through a land corridor over Victoria Falls.

In 1973, with a post-graduate diploma in industrial administration and his new wife, he headed for the Kingdom of Tonga, to become director of tourism.

He had to draw up a development plan for the industry. "Then it had to be agreed with the king. It was a benevolent autocracy. It was the most ethnically pure of the Polynesian islands. To me, it was a very fragile place. It was just a magic place. I felt a responsibility to make sure whatever was going to happen in tourism, it wasn't going to be tourism pollution. And it has remained at quite a low key level, even though there is an international airport."

He's never been back - afraid to spoil the magic image.

But he had been out of Ireland for 16 years. "If you stay too long in any of these places, there are not sufficient challenges really . . . and you might sort of lose out on getting back into the mainstream again if you stay too long." So the Wallis family returned and Peter became market development manager (Europe) for Irish Distillers and stayed for nine years.

"It was the sort of seeding of Irish whiskey in Europe. One of the nice things about working in Europe was there were no negatives about Irish whiskey. It was an interesting and informative time in my life."

Again, he changed jobs. Edward Dillon and Co Ltd was 83 per cent owned by Irish Distillers. "It was a reverse role play - I had been an exporter, suddenly I was becoming an importer. I knew most of the things from the other side of the table."

The foundation brands of Dillon's are Hennessy brandy and Sandeman port. Other brands handled by Dillon's include Gordon's gin, Haig whisky, Bushmills (Black Bush is his favourite), and then there's a range of wines.

"The world of drinks is always changing, it's an ongoing evolution," he explains. "The big change came to the from '88 onwards - it was the time when Saunders was buying Bells. You had the formation of United Distillers. At that time they were looking to have part of the action of their distributors, so they took a shareholding (in Edward Dillon). Irish Distillers diluted their shareholding to allow them in."

Edward Dillon also bought B Daly Ireland Ltd from the Williams Family and Bass.

"They had a complementary portfolio of brands - Bacardi, Jack Daniels, Southern Comfort, Moet et Chandon, Mateus Rose and Black and White. They were a 300,000 case company; we were able to absorb about 200,000 of those cases into the company. This gave us a new platform for growth and allowed us to increase our sales and marketing departments."

Further shareholding changes occurred in 1996 when Irish Distillers sold 33.2 per cent of Edward Dillon to Bacardi and drinks group Brown Forman. "That was an important development. We had therefore all our main spirit suppliers as part of the shareholding," he says.

And he believes there are more exciting times ahead for the drinks industry. "The wine market is now double the spirit market in volume terms. The spirit market has grown - particularly white spirits - quite dramatically. The sale of Seagrams will change quite a lot of things. Who's going to get it I just don't know . . . possibly some people still in the long grass. Seagrams has brands in this marketplace - Barton and Guestier and Sandeman are with us."

On his own company, he says: "I would be fairly confident that we have a solid business with those brands going forward, and as we have pretty tight distribution agreements, which it would be quite onerous for somebody to take away from us.

Edward Dillon does not disclose sales or profits, but the business handles more than one million cases annually. Around 80 people are employed, distribution is done by contract and the company has over 100,000 square feet of warehousing near Dublin airport.

When not working and sailing - a sport shared by his wife and daughters Amy, Joanna and Kim - he plays cricket with the Taverners, a team he formed with a group of friends in Dalkey. As somebody who has been a regular visitor to South Africa before and after apartheid, he says he finds it a most vibrant society. "One just hopes that it's going to attract investors so they can really tackle their unemployment.

"They need jobs. Africa is not easy to forecast. If you look at the stock exchange in South Africa, their mining interests, natural resources, they have tremendous potential if they can harness it," he says. "But they really need to tackle the unemployment issues. They have tremendous social problems."

So he is hopeful for the future? "I have to be. I want it to work."