Uncorked (17 page)

In New York, many sommeliers seem to have been night people in previous lives. Far from the chubby French guy with the silver cup dangling from his neck, the current generation of soms tends to be gaunt, pale, and tattooed. Proud of their high-low inclinations, they are night crawlers and aesthetes. They are hip and discriminating and not afraid to let you know it. I remember one visit to Luca D’Attoma, winemaker at Tuscany’s famed Le Macchiole and now producer of his own wines, organized by Acid Inc. Selections, his New York distributor. This particular sommelier, the head of wine buying for David Chang’s (of Momofuku fame) empire, drank seven beers and took two Xanax on the way over, glasses of every wine offered at lunch (eight by my count), beers in the afternoon, and then a few more Xanax and a couple more bottles of wine that night. Confident, charming, knowledgeable, Julian was also a complete mess.

Between the customer kowtowing and the hard-driving lifestyle, it’s no surprise that many sommeliers burn out and move to other wine-related enterprises. Some end up dragging around
wine-filled rolling luggage as salespeople for distributors. Some take time off by working the harvest for a famous producer. A few become winemakers. Others take refuge in the comparative sanity of a retail store. Ryan was ready for something normal.

Immediately, he put his mark on our selections, and there was some friction. In his efforts to make our assortment stand out, occasionally, I thought, Ryan prized interesting over serviceable. We had wines from Marcillac, an obscure appellation in southwestern France, but no Amarone, the famed Venetian red pressed from dried grapes, in a store named Pasanella. Geographically, his preferences were like that famous
New Yorker
cartoon “View of the World from Ninth Avenue” by Saul Steinberg, placing the city as the center of the earth separated by the Hudson River from a thin brown strip representing “Jersey,” behind which are a few rocks representing the US mainland. Farther away lies a blue sliver (“Pacific Ocean”), and in the distance sit three tiny landmasses labeled China, Russia, and Japan. In Ryan’s case, the center of the world was France. Austria, Germany, and Italy were close by. In the distance, northern California and the Northwest were highlighted. But the rest of the planet was a far-off mass called the “New World.” I had always wanted the store to have a geographically varied selection of the world’s best artisan producers. I was as proud of our New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs as I was of our Sicilian Frappati.

As Ryan soon discovered, a retail wine selection can be a trickier challenge than a restaurant list. Instead of pairing two dozen wines to a specific menu, a store must maintain several hundred selections to accommodate a wide variety of foods and preferences. In addition, customers tend to be more tightfisted
about drinking at home than when they go out to dinner. In our case, this means that four out of five bottles we sell are under $15.

Those bottles typically cost us $10 each, but in a restaurant Ryan could make that back on the first glass pour. Sold by the glass, the same bread-and-butter, ten-buck bottle brought in $50 in revenue! That $40 profit could be plowed back into acquisitions of unusual bottles he could then afford to hold on to for months or in some cases years.

Retailers, he soon discovered, do not have that luxury. Ryan wanted the cool stuff, but we also needed the staples. With 80 percent of the monthly budget going toward the least expensive wines, Ryan’s appetite often exceeded the available dough.

However, he managed to cobble together a fascinating assortment for people who wanted some discovery with their spaghetti. The wine trade started coming. Even the sommelier for Thomas Keller’s Per Se restaurant became a regular. Our family life improved as Becky no longer had to work the occasional evening or weekend in addition to her full-time job at Martha Stewart.

I was less thrilled when, in the fall of 2008, just as Agent Watts had predicted, I heard from the State Liquor Authority. After six months of silence, I received a “Notice of Proceedings to Cancel or Revoke” that listed an upcoming hearing for the following week. The triple whammy of the new restrictions on tastings, Suzanne’s departure, and the recession’s arrival meant that our events business had shriveled up. We were about to lose our license for something we no longer did and had no money to show for.

Stew Burg was infuriatingly lackadaisical. After taking a few days to return my frantic calls, he told me to authorize a plea of
no contest and offer to pay some money. By the end of the week, the State Liquor Authority agreed. I paid the fine. And poof, my inquest was history.

Good news kept coming. Several months into Ryan’s tenure, Martha Stewart proposed to celebrate
Martha Stewart Living
’s major fall issue by having a party—I mean a
tasting
—in the store. To some degree, the location made sense as our upstairs apartment was featured in the magazine that month. But we still appreciated her loyalty—and tacit stamp of approval. We knew that if Martha didn’t love the store, she never would have suggested the event. For Martha, quality always comes first.

In preparation, it was now Becky’s turn to pop Xanax as she organized an elegant party for a boss whose billion-dollar company was born from her ability to produce elegant parties. A few days before the event, Martha did a drive-by to inspect the last-minute preparations. In anticipation of her arrival, we straightened all the displays, every bottle was turned so all the labels matched, the floor glistened, and the cabinet pulls sparkled. We even double-checked our stacks of labeled plastic bins in the storage area. Candles? Check. Cocktail napkins? Check. Glasses? Check. Martha scanned the room, nodded in approval, and then made a beeline for the gussied-up storage area, where she immediately came upon the one thing we had not Pledged to death: a spoon she held up as if dangling a particularly smelly beetle. “You’re going to polish all this, right?”

Despite the silverware scare, the party was spectacular, well attended, and fun. Martha also surprised Becky by presenting her with a huge trove of vintage china in a pattern she knew Becky had started collecting to use for store events. She also decided to shoot an episode of her television show in our enoteca. This time
the spoons were shiny, and the segment went even better than the party. Ryan was informative and articulate. Becky was radiant and charming. And I, rigid and sweaty, looked a little like Albert Brooks in
Broadcast News
. It didn’t matter. After all the hardships that year—the Janet drama, the SLA inquest, the sold car, the dead dog, the money woes, and the flood that wasn’t—things were looking up. Or so I thought.

chapter 6

“H
OW WOULD YOU LIKE
to open a store up in Connecticut?” a vaguely familiar voice asked on the other end of the line? The caller, Tom Seiler, who had shopped in the store the previous week, explained that he wanted to create a Pasanella & Son as part of a large historic restoration of downtown South Norwalk, Connecticut. Lying at the mouth of the Norwalk River, South Norwalk once had been a bustling harbor town with handsome brick factories lining the port. Like many industrial cities, it had fallen on hard times. What remained were the factories and an attractive, if empty, center city.

With its good architectural bones and proximity to Greenwich and Darien, Tom saw Norwalk as having excellent potential. Affluent residents of neighboring towns were flocking to a handful of hip restaurants in the burgeoning downtown. The appeal, Tom explained, was that South Norwalk offered a “taste of New York without the traffic.” “What they really want,” he concluded, “are bottles of nice wine to take home.” Genial Tom was gung ho to start immediately. “What do you think?” he asked.

“Hmm … maybe,” I temporized as I mouthed “Oh, my God!” to Becky.

Expansion had not been part of our original idea, but this opportunity
sounded too good to pass up. Tom had the space and would put up all the money. He proposed a setup fee and royalty checks based on gross sales. In return, we would design, construct, supervise, staff, and set up the initial buys and whatever else it took to get the store going. They would get a fully operational business with a rising name. It sounded pretty straightforward.

Negotiations took forever. The real boss, it turned out, was Tom’s Darien neighbor, a New York real estate broker named Jim Quinn. Except for the Range Rover, Jim reminded me of my buff but belligerent former fish tenant. Having worked in a real estate firm out of college, I knew the type: gregarious but tough and wily too.

As the economy plummeted, we inked the deal. The only thing missing was the initial check. After a few weeks, Jim called to explain that cash was tight and he was about to send a payment for a quarter of what the contract stipulated. I told him I understood that real estate was hurting. During the next six weeks, I threw myself into the work and designed the entire store, including all the fixtures.

No money came.

I found the perfect manager in neighboring New Haven.

No money came.

I even got Domenick’s to promise to consign us a vintage Lancia to use as a store display.

Still no money.

Meanwhile, Jim transferred Tom to another of his projects, and Jim was becoming harder to pin down. The new wineshop was losing steam. Over the next six months, we had a series of meetings, and finally, Jim explained that he was out of cash.

Yet three months after Jim asked to halt our collaboration
because he could not pay his debt to us, he applied for a liquor license using the Pasanella name!

Then came another ill-timed call. I didn’t know exactly what to think when Armando called to ask if we could meet. I could sense the anxiety in his voice.

“Sure, come on over,” I told him.

Armando showed up without his wheelie bag.

“You know how I value our friendship,” he began.

Uh oh.

“You also know that I have started a new distributorship,” he continued.

Super uh oh.

“I want to hire Janet.”

I did not fall off my chair or make a witty retort.

“What?” I stammered.

“Well, she’s talented,” he started.

“And crazy—and she
stole
our mailing list!” I helped him finish.

“I just wanted you to know.”

“Don’t worry,” he added, “she won’t be calling on you.”

A few weeks later, I was forwarded another of Janet’s highfalutin e-mail sales pitches. Evidently, the plum job Armando had offered her wasn’t enough to keep her from shilling her own stuff on the side.

In place of Janet’s histrionics was Ryan’s West Coast cool, even if he sometimes sounded more like a sommelier than a wine salesman.