JUST about every wine lover I know buys a bottle or two every time fate offers an escape from this State, where duty irritatingly still stands at £1.61 on table wine and £3.22 on sparkling wine. Nobody (except, perhaps, the Minister for Finance) needs to be reminded these rates are vastly higher than in Britain, the place we are most likely to go, with London topping the list of destinations.
Where is the best hunting ground for interesting bargains? The high street chains offer value but have lost some of their magnetism now Irish shops are selling so many of the same wines. Go to the opposite extreme, I suggest - to the oldest, grandest wine merchant in England.
The first surprising thing about Berry Bros & Rudd in St James's is that, despite its deeply aristocratic air and book-sized catalogue of vintage treasures, it is the source of excellent wines for everyday drinking at cheeringly competitive prices. Some of the most tempting you will find nowhere else.
Another surprise about this famous old family firm, in business in the same premises for almost 300 years, with its wooden floor and high oak panelling, its leather-bound books and cartoons of famous past customers, is that there is no wine. Instead, there is an oval table where you are expected to sit with a sales assistant, discussing your drinking requirements which will eventually be fetched from the cellar.
Do not be put off. You don't have to be a member of the gentry, in Savile Row three-piece suit or county tweeds, to carry this off. Nor do you have to be knowledgeable about wine or prepared to part with more than a fiver. The staff are friendly democrats.
Besides, nowhere else can so much history be soaked up in the time it takes to decide on a couple of bottles. The ground beneath your feet was once the tennis court of Henry VIII. The business evolved from an "Italian warehouse" for spices, tea and coffee, set up in the late 1690s by a woman known as the Widow Bourne - hence the old "Coffee Mill" signs inside and outside the shop. By the middle of the 18th century, when the premises looked very much as they do now, this grocery, a stone's throw from St James's Palace, was the best in London - patronised by the beau monde. The rich and famous came both to buy and to be weighed on the shop's enormous scales: Byron and Beau Brummel were among the early weightwatchers whose tell-tale statistics were carefully recorded.
By the early 1800s, the first of eight generations of Berrys had inherited the business and begun to concentrate on wine and spirits. Partnership with the Rudd family, a century later, was cemented with the development of Cutty Sark whisky, which Berry Bros & Rudd still owns.
This firm, apparently creaking with antiquity, was in fact one of the first to go on the Internet - nervously, apparently, fearing an outcry from traditionalists: the move has been a huge success, bringing new customers and making ordering easier for many existing ones.
"Everybody thinks we're terribly old-fashioned and stuffy," says marketing director Simon Berry, "but underneath we're young and vibrant and modern. That's not such a contradiction. The fact we've been here for 300 years means we've continued to change all the time."
More significant still was Berrys' decision to open a shop in Heathrow Terminal 3 in 1994, when invited by the British Airports Authority to target businessmen with time and money to spare. The figures speak for themselves. While the average spent on a bottle in St James's is £8, it is £25 "and climbing" in Heathrow. A Hong Kong passenger recently bought a magnum of Chateau Margaux 1900 for £8,500, having first carefully checked its provenance - and thoughtfully telephoned later to say how much he had enjoyed it.
"But the real skill of the wine merchant is to be able to find good things at the lower end of the market - not just expensive bottles,"Simon Berry stresses.
For as long as anybody can remember, the firm has sourced moderately priced wines to sell under the Berrys' Own Selection label. This, I think, is where the gems lie for Irish shoppers.
These wines, made by first-rate producers to the company's exacting requirements, offer great value. The longest established in the range, the Good Ordinary Claret (see Bottle of the Week), is the company's runaway bestseller.
Most of the 30 or so Own Selection wines are non-vintage, by the way, because they are blended to achieve consistency of quality and flavour - rather like champagne. And it's worth remembering that all Berrys' wines are correctly stored, for a longer period than is now common in the trade, because they have their own cellars.
Although it is the classics - claret and Burgundy, sherry and champagne - that are best known, Berry's Own Selection is expanding all the time to incorporate worthwhile additions from the New World. "More and more good wines are being made all over the place," Simon Berry says, "and if we find something good we'll shout our excitement about it from the rooftops."
There you are: another impassioned wine man, in love with fine flavours. He goes on to articulate his excitement at another departure, the decision to sell top quality teas - the height of fashion and at the same time a nostalgic return to the old grocery days. In case you're interested, Darjeeling Lingia is the Mouton Rothschild of the tea list.