Uncorked (15 page)

On New Year’s Day 2008, it all came, as it does every year, to a screeching halt. However, unlike the partiers in their funny hats, our hangover lasts through February. It’s as if after all that holiday revelry, no one can bear to see another bottle of alcohol for two months. For most stores, midwinter is a time to recoup and take stock. In bigger shops, clerks often loiter on the floor. In our shop, it was Guendi, who now lounged by my feet on the enoteca’s stone floor. It’s a comedown from the Christmas frenzy but a welcome one. For some.

Janet’s e-mails kept coming. More customers were confused. “Are these yours?” they asked. Worse, some couldn’t wait to tell me that they had just placed orders with “us” via e-mail. Then the tax bill came. It turned out Janet had neglected to file three quarterly sales tax returns from a year and a half ago. The government wanted its money. So did everyone else. No amount of Becky’s reassurance (“That’s when Luca was born; of course you were distracted.” “And don’t you remember that we were renovating
the upstairs apartments too?”) could assuage my self-loathing. How could I have not followed up on something so basic? Why did I not check up after a twenty-nine-year-old? I messed up. Oh, boy.

Several weeks later and after many nights spent upright from three to four o’clock, I went downstairs to open the store and found water cascading from every crack. The bottles were getting soaked. Our plumber deduced that we had a burst pipe behind a second floor bathroom. Within minutes, the pipe was patched. Total disaster was narrowly avoided, but I was more on edge than ever.

A few friends were starting to admit doubts about my life-changing experiment. An English chum who prides himself on his brutal honesty told me, “Close the store. Sell the building.” “You’ve already maximized your return,” the buyer of distressed media properties advised. “Move on,” he insisted. I countered, stuttering things like “But the market is still going up.”

What I really wanted to say to everyone was, “But what about that Pinot Noir we discovered on the second floor? How about those smiling faces in the store? And our home on top of it all? What about doing what you love, living where you work, creating the life you dreamed of? Thomas Jefferson was broke when he died. Would you have told him to sell Monticello?”

Underneath all that cynicism, I wanted to tell my pal with the shimmering shoulder-length hair, “You’re a romantic. And what you really think is that I’m too attached—to the store, to the building, to the way of life—and you’re afraid I could get hurt.”

BEFORE THE RENOVATION
, the store had been featured on
Law & Order
as two prostitutes duked it out on the sidewalk in front of our graffiti-covered roll-down gates.
Law & Order
always seemed to shoot in our neighborhood when they had to fish a floater out of the East River, so I was not immediately alarmed when a guy with a badge hung around his neck strolled in. “Extra,” I thought. Then he asked for me and started snapping pictures as if he were documenting a crime scene. Suddenly, I was no longer watching a police drama, I was starring in one.

John Watts, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Barney Fife, told me that I had done a bad thing. Actually, many bad things. In our back room, we had, he said after he paused, “events.” There was no use denying it because they had already confirmed it. “Agents requested information,” and, he nodded knowingly, “you sent it.”

“But of course you can have tastings in the enoteca,” I responded. “It’s right on our website.”

“You did not have tastings,” he countered. “You had
events
. Tastings are educational.”

“But we typically pour six different wines while our sommelier explains their origins and guides our guests through tasting each example. How’s that not educational?”

“You had food.”

“Yes,” I said. “We often pair wines with antipasti from Barbarini, the Italian restaurant around the corner.”

Mr. Watts was losing his patience: “The law says you can serve tidbits. And you had food.”

I was starting to feel like Kafka’s Josef K. I knew food was a critical issue for the authority. In New York State (although the laws vary from state to state), there are two basic categories of
license: “on-premise,” which allows consumption of alcohol on the spot, such as restaurants and bars, and “off-premise,” which authorizes retailers to sell sealed wine and liquor bottles to be drunk somewhere else. However, the law also allows for wineshops to conduct tastings and to offer tidbits to accompany the wines. I just assumed that tidbits meant “little things to eat.”

John and I went back and forth. I started to get strident. I asked him if this meant that the three dozen wineshop events on LocalWineEvents.com that week were also illegal, since the site mentioned dinners with winemakers and other tidbit-heavy stuff that, frankly, seemed pretty appealing to people interested in wine.

Special Agent Watts turned stony and went back to documenting our glass racks and cocktail napkins. Once he determined that we did not have a kitchen, a big no-no for a retail store, he seemed to soften. “You should ask your lawyer,” Watts suggested. “He’ll know the difference.” And then, like all the detectives you see on
Law & Order
, he said, “You’ll be hearing from us.”

The next day I did not contact the lawyer who had helped us with our permit. I went to see one of the city’s foremost liquor law attorneys. I spoke to the counsel to Acker Merrall & Condit, the country’s oldest wine merchant, as well as to the restaurateur Brian McNally, a former commissioner for the State Liquor Authority. From around the Formica-covered conference table, the old pro ambiguated: “The law is fuzzy. You should ask one of your wine distributors. They know the ins and outs.” Then he blurted, “Besides, I can’t represent you anyway. One of my clients is Janet Hoover.”

Oh, you mean the Janet Hoover who may have complained (or had someone protest on her behalf) to the New York State
Liquor Authority in response to my complaint?! Somehow—though I had no proof, I could only imagine her showing up at the State Liquor Authority’s offices sporting her bright red glasses—the SLA took more issue with our tastings than with someone selling wine without a license.

When I asked Armando, he had a more informative take: the key is to remember that you are not charging for experiences, he advised, but for educational materials. From what he recommended, customers should really be charged $75 a head for leaflets with tasting notes. Technically, he pointed out, the wine and food are free.

Despite this insight, Armando still could not define a tidbit. I sifted through the entire New York Alcoholic Beverage Control code from the State Liquor Authority and also could not find a definition. Then I found an article from the
New York Times
that explained how fudgeable it all seemed. Florence Fabricant described the wide range of foods that were served at tastings at some of the best-known liquor stores in Manhattan. For example, 67 Wines & Spirits, a large Upper West Side store that has been in business since 1941, even has a kitchen. Mario Batali’s Italian Wine Merchants serves five-course wine dinners out of its shop. Chelsea Wine Merchant, as the article described, has a lower-level dining room that it uses for catered meals. What do these guys know that I don’t?

Until I figured out exactly what was permissible, I suspended all enoteca activity. Since the tastings were much more profitable than meager midwinter wine sales it hurt. But we had no choice. After a year and a half, Suzanne left to become a sommelier, a
logical step for her but a painful one for us. To make matters worse, we were behind on our mortgage again.

I decided to take a radical step to shore up our finances. I sold our well-known store fixture, the one featured in all the articles, my 1967 Ferrari 330 GT 2+2.

“Boo hoo,” you must be thinking, “Poor schnook had to get rid of his fancy car.” You’re right.

Then again, the Ferrari was more than just a car or a store fixture. As mythic as a 2001 Quintarelli Barolo or a 1997 Sassicaia, this 1960s gentleman’s Gran Turismo was the embodiment of that dolce vita dream life that opening a wineshop was supposed to offer. Although meant for streaking across Europe in style, even when sitting behind the wheel in the middle of the store, it was hard not to feel like Marcello Mastroianni. The car embodied style, freedom, and ease with a Continental flair. It was also damn beautiful. I loved its evanescent silver blue paint color and Borrani wire wheels and listening to the thrum of those twelve cylinders.

Some attributes that I admired about the car were similar to what drew me to wine: I loved the smell of leather and wood and gasoline—all adjectives used to describe wine. (Good Rieslings famously often have a “petrol” nose.) I loved the nuance: the machined ashtray inlaid with crossed enamel flags and the pistol grip shift lever.

I was, however, a little less crazy about actually driving it. The racing-derived clutch was too heavy. The enormous wooden steering wheel could have been used to steer a yacht. It took twenty minutes to warm up. None of that really mattered because
before I had the store, the Ferrari spent much of its time at the mechanic, another connection to Italy albeit via the White Plains, New York, garage.

A specialist in vintage Italian autos, Domenick’s European Car Repair “maintained” the Ferrari. In truth, in the ten years I owned the car, the shop never quite finished the work. But that was okay, because Domenick’s was equally casual about the bills. During those years, I also became very fond of the shop’s owners, Domenick Spadaro in beret and zip-up blue suit and his sons, Santo and Frank. One of the benefits of owning the car was that I got to eat biscotti and discuss mysterious rumbles and electrical quirks with the Spadaro family.

I got a nice offer from a Swiss collector, who dispatched his mechanic to inspect the car. His
jah
of approval was quickly followed by a wire transfer. I flung open the store’s double doors and drove her out onto the sidewalk, where the shipper quickly loaded her into a large transport truck.

During that dark year in the middle of the recession, I also learned that I could be happy and miserable at the same time, especially in Italy during the summer.

Becky and I had a dazzling lunch at Lorenzo, the two-star Michelin restaurant in Forte dei Marmi owned by Lorenzo Viani, a passionate fisherman turned equally fanatical restaurateur. Lorenzo’s fans include Giorgio Armani and Sirio Maccioni, owner of the famed New York restaurant Le Cirque, which is reputed to have been inspired by Lorenzo’s place. Lorenzo’s trademark is impeccably prepared, swimming-that-morning seafood.

We started with a local favorite, red mullet fillets (the firm fish tastes clean and fresh with a brininess that was prized by the Romans, who kept them as pets) baked with marinated vegetables flavored with celery; an octopus salad with potatoes, green beans, and Jerusalem artichoke purée; and a heaping platter of melt-in-your-mouth-tender tiny roasted squid.

Then came the pastas: ravioli stuffed with sea bass in a squid and crab sauce (ravioli ripieni di branzino in salsa di totani di sabbia e granchio), risotto with zucchini flowers, gratinéed red crawfish flavored with marjoram, and a sublime, disarmingly simple bavette (a curvy linguini) with a seafood sauce.

We were already undoing our pants’ buttons when the main course arrived. Lorenzo brought out one of his favorite dishes: slow-cooked salt cod over chickpeas, pickled onions, and tomatoes. My father dived into a “tricolor” lobster salad with garlic, basil, and apple vinegar dressing. Luca gobbled up the Saint Peter’s fish (another prized Mediterranean species with a delicate and flaky texture) bathed in a clam and crustacean sauce.

To add to the pleasure, Chiara, Lorenzo’s daughter and my friend, had brought over a bottle of Radikon from her equally amazing wineshop around the corner from her father’s famed eatery. Although not particularly well known in the United States, Radikon is one of the originators of Italy’s natural wine movement. The Friulian producer makes rich whites with an almost sherrylike nuttiness. They are wines to be savored. We luxuriated.