Still wheeling?

Zanzibar was a rather nice private drinking club in the then up-and-coming area of Covent Garden. It was the mid-1970s and London's smart set welcomed the cocktail hang-out with fuddled fervour. "It was the wavy bar," says John Armit, wine merchant by day, dance-hall owner-turned-club owner and restaurateur by night. "You could do all the flirting you liked."

He's been around, has Armit. His company, Notting Hill-based John Armit Wines, has set itself up with a nice number supplying top-class restaurants around the country. In case you were in any doubt of the calibre, look at the roll-call of restaurants on the back of his wine list. It has a certain bent towards those conscious of their surroundings and serious about their food and wines. "We are quite choosy," he says. "We don't want to deal with everybody."

A pedigree of distinction

His wine pedigree is impeccable. At the age of 28 he was made managing director of city wine company Corney & Barrow, after an education that involved many of Paris's top restaurants and bars - at the expense of Armit's French stepfather. "It changed my life. I learnt about great food and wine and what fun it all was."

In 1969, he bought Corney & Barrow from its owners, IDV, and built it into "the best wine company in England at that time". But Armit got restless.

What does a city wine merchant do when he gets fidgety? He opens a dance venue in North London - "a sleazy dancehall," corrects Armit, "called Dingwall's on Camden Lock. We got all the great bands of the time to come. It had the biggest bar in London, plus a dance floor and a restaurant. I was incredibly naive and I got into a lot of trouble, but it was an awful lot of fun."

Armit's second venture was "a little more elegant". He teamed up with present business partner Tony Mackintosh and found a site in Covent Garden for an upmarket private drinking club he called Zanzibar, installing the infamous wavy bar. "The problem with bars is that you can only talk to one person at a time, so we created a wavy bar that allowed up to five people to talk to each other without standing up."

Meanwhile, Armit was harbouring fantasies of living on a tropical island. In 1978 he sold his Corney & Barrow shares, relinquishing his MD status and took off to Sri Lanka. He lived a colonial life in a villa outside Candy with views over dense jungle and distant mountains, returning to Europe for the summers, buying and advising to keep his hand in.

Notting Hill has always been his UK home, so in 1982 he returned to open a restaurant, 192, at the bottom end of Kensington Park Road, a street away from the noisy hub of Portobello Road.

Fourteen years on, it is still going strong, a magnet for well-heeled locals and a sprinkling of celebrities, and a bit of a breeding ground for top chefs. Alastair Little made his name there, as did Maddelena Bonino and Angela Dwyer. Now Albert Clark is pulling them in, with his own brand of modern British food earning weighty write-ups in the guide books.

"Though Tony [Mackintosh] is entirely responsible for the success of the restaurant," Armit says. "I just fiddle around a bit with the wines." With a big helping hand from his wine buyer Susie De Paolis.

Then came The Groucho Club. In 1986 Armit was approached by a group of publishers with the idea of a club "with a strong literary nucleus" as an alternative to the stuffier Garrick. The discreet double doors still pour out literary luvvies on to Dean Street after an afternoon's imbibing at the leather-and-chrome bar.

Armit's wine business for private clients started in 1978, buying wines for "a limited number of people who had a lot of money to buy wines with". Today it is worth £8.5m, with restaurant customers making up about 20% of his business - Armit changed direction in 1991 when interest rates soared and his private clients tightened their purse strings.

The wine list is now a slick piece of graphics which bulges with big names. France is Armit's first love. He takes the credit for introducing Pomerol into this country in his Corney & Barrow days. A secondary list, Great Wines, shows off the older vintage classed growths of Burgundy and Bordeaux plus a few New World classics. "I concentrate mainly on great wines," he says.

Until a year ago, Italian wines never really had much of a presence on the list. Now Angelo Gaja is on everyone's lips (Armit shares the distribution with Lay & Wheeler).

He has gone outside Tuscany to source his "Super Tuscans" - one of which is an outstanding Bordeaux classed growth-style wine from Trentino, San Leonardo. "Carlo Gonzaga is making the best wine in the Trentino,' he says.

One wine that goes down a storm is the Mulderbosch Sauvignon Blanc. Armit found it on a buying trip to South Africa, after a tip from wine writer Tim Atkin. "We've never got enough of it - 4,000 cases just go out the door."

He works closely with wine-makers on development and style of wine. "We do not go in for the shotgun effect favoured by many wine merchants, where they may only stock five cases of a wine. We like to choose our wines carefully and in large quantities - but that doesn't mean we want to sell to the high-street multiples. Restaurants are a very good niche for us."

Australia has a slim but select presence on his list. "I like Delatite very much. We started working with the Richi family last year - great restaurant wines," Armit adds. The Delatite Dungeon Gully 1994 Mansfield has lingering spicy fruit and appears in the list with two stars next to its name - these are wines that he considers to be exceptional in quality and value, and another subtle selling tool.

"Ask him about South America," shouts Anna Hugo, 192's personable manager. Last month, Armit brought his friend Francis Mallmann, "the greatest chef in South America," plus two Tango singers, some Patagonian king crabs and Pampas beef "to bring a bit of Argentina to London" for a food and wine promotion in seven London restaurants.

Armit's love affair with Argentina is supported by a page of Argentinean wines on the list together with a poetical rant from Mallmann.

The 1996-97 list will be based entirely on poetry. "I've asked all the major growers to write a poem for us. You see, the poem will reflect the man in exactly the same way that his wine reflects the man." Available any day now.