A charity dinner, auction, wine sales and sponsored diet helped raise a huge £150,000 for Wine Relief on Red Nose Day (Friday 13th March).

Berrys’ Big Red Nose Dinner with Ch. Latour and Jancis Robinson MW raised £23,500 for Wine Relief, one of the fundraisers for Comic Relief. The auction, also held in the cellars beneath Berrys’ London shop, saw 15 imperials of top Bordeaux wines from the legendary 2005 vintage raise £37,500 and another five lots made an additional £65,000. A further £6,000 was raised from the sales of Berrys’ best selling wine Good Ordinary Claret in the six weeks before Red Nose Day and £17,000 from a sponsored diet undertaken by 16 Berrys’ staff.

Wine Relief is the brainchild of internationally respected Master of Wine Jancis Robinson and her husband, restaurant critic, Nick Lander. They put their heads together to devise Wine Relief in 1999 which has fast become a key fundraiser for every Red Nose Day campaign since. Wine Relief has raised over £3.5 million as part of the Red Nose Day campaigns.

Jancis Robinson says she was speechless after the event which raised such an amazing total.

“While millions of Britons were watching what sounds like a distinctly superior night of comedy in aid of Comic Relief on BBC1, I spent last Friday evening in the cellars of Berry Bros. in St James’s, London at the wonderful Ch. Latour dinner which, with its small number of hand-picked, rare auction items and some extremely generous bidders, managed to raise an extraordinary total. Coupled with the sums raised by selling Berrys’ Good Ordinary Claret during the fundraising period and the famous Chunky Monkey campaign, which has seen sponsored weight fall off the likes of Jasper Morris MW and Simon Staples,” says Jancis who says she is delighted with the unbelievable total.

Separately at the Berry’s headquarters in Basingstoke, members of Berrys’ fine wine team Matt Tipping and Simon Lubawy (left) ‘did something funny for money’ by painting their heads red in a bid to mimic this year’s Red Nose design.