Uncorked (19 page)
Authors: Marco Pasanella
As frustrated as we were about the label, our ordeal underscored the difficulties with “organic” wines. With so many different accreditations and national standards (or the lack thereof), the organic designation seesaws between being unreasonably withheld and tossed around like a knee-jerk marketing adjective (“Proprietors’ Reserve”).
In response to the dizzying regulations and the overuse of the term
organic
, some winemakers, including ones we respect, call their wines “natural.” In our experience, winemakers who eschew “organic” in favor of the lower-key “natural” tend to walk the walk—in contrast to the broader consumer product market, in which “natural” is almost meaningless. These are the owner-operators who avoid chemical fertilizers but also minimize their energy use and tend to see their farms as more than grape factories. The truth is that you do not know how committed a producer is to responsible winemaking unless you know him and have been to his vineyard. One of the most responsible producers I have met is the courtly Count Michael Goëss-Enzenberg, owner of the Tenuta Manincor in Italy’s Trentino–Alto Adige region. To minimize the impact on the South Tyrolean landscape, the count’s entire winery is underground. The winemaking process is gravity fed: grapes start their journey just beneath the surface and end up with wine five stories into the earth. His bottles have
reusable glass stoppers. Manincor even grows his own oak for the barrels! But you will not see the “organic” label anywhere on his bottles.
Despite our semiorganic status, we decided to move ahead. I stretched our finances one last time. I emptied what was left in our bank accounts and ordered nearly eight thousand bottles.
I had shipped containers of my furniture designs from Italy before and so was at least mildly conversant with the ins and outs of boat transport. The basic ocean freight is deceptively inexpensive: $700 for a twenty-thousand-pound container. Yet I already understood that over 80 percent of the shipping cost was for charges other than the boat fare. I also knew that we wanted to ship wine in months such as May and September, when the weather is mild, to minimize the wine’s exposure to temperature extremes. From distributors, I had heard horror stories of containers that had been stacked at the port in the searing sun. A few days sitting outside in a metal container could literally cook the wine.
Of course, we were going to make no such amateurish mistakes!
But on top of the label hang-up, there was a lack of urgency on the part of the trucker picking up the wine from the vineyard—the hour and a half trip took three weeks—which in turn caused another delay as the wine missed the ship and had to wait for another vessel. This is why on June 21, 2009, Father’s Day, in the middle of an early summer heat wave, I found myself trembling and sweating over this wine. It was, as they say in Tuscany, a
casino
(“total mess”).
I fretted over boiled wine, but I fantasized about cracking open the first bottle of our very own juice. If by some miracle the
wine wasn’t cooked, would it taste as good as I remembered it in Roland’s cellars? The wait stirred up in me that mix of anxiety and excitement that has always been part of the appeal of opening a wine bottle. You can do research. You can know the scores. You can get advice. You may have even tasted that particular selection before. But uncorking a bottle is always a surprise. And I had thousands of bottles waiting for me on a dock in New Jersey.
Six days after it had arrived at the New Jersey port at the end of June, the container finally was delivered. After Ryan and I unloaded 660 cases by hand (no forklift), we sat down for the moment of truth. At the store, with a few bottles piled up on boxes surrounded by disarray, much as when we had first tasted with Janet, I carefully uncorked our first bottle of Pasanella & Figlio (“Son” in Italian) Rosso. I poured two tastes in our enoteca. We looked at each other for a moment. We picked up the glasses and gently swirled. The deep purply color was as I had remembered it. The nose was rich and redolent of ripe fruit. Then, for the slow slosh over the tongue:
“Wait, that’s a little sharp,” I said.
Ryan looked spooked. Then he took a taste and nodded in agreement.
Not good.
Determined not to panic, we let the bottle sit for a few minutes.
“Ah, yes,” we both said, nodding as we took more sips. There was that familiar flavor: the tongue-caressing berryness followed by a hint of tang—just the kind of kick that would be perfect with food. It was all okay. Actually, our wine was more than okay; it was damn delicious. The only thing that remained to be seen was whether anyone else would agree.
HOMEMADE SPAGHETTI
WITH LEMON ZEST
SERVES 4
In the heat of the summer, I love to make this light, refreshing pasta with a delicate sauce. To highlight the chewiness of the homemade dough, I cut it into strips that are slightly wider than spaghetti (“little strings”) but not quite as wide as fettuccine (“little slices”). I suggest accompanying it with any light summer white wine, such as Vermentino, my preference. This dish also pairs well with Grüner Veltliners and Pinot Grigios
.
FOR THE SPAGHETTI
2 CUPS ALL-PURPOSE FLOUR
,
PLUS A FEW TABLESPOONS FOR DUSTING
2 LARGE EGGS
SALT
FOR THE SAUCE
6 TABLESPOONS EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL
2 GARLIC CLOVES, FINELY CHOPPED
½ FRESH RED CHILI PEPPER
,
SEEDS REMOVED AND FINELY CHOPPED
1 LARGE LEMON, ZESTED AND JUICED
1 SMALL HANDFUL CURLY PARSLEY
PARMESAN CHEESE
SALT AND PEPPER
FOR THE SPAGHETTI
Mound the two cups of flour on a work surface and make a hole in the middle. Crack the eggs into the hole. Beat the eggs with a fork and gently mix in the flour from the sides. Mix until the dough becomes uniform. Sprinkle more flour on the surface and start kneading the dough. If the dough is too dry or crumbly, sprinkle it with a few drops of lukewarm water.
Once the dough has been kneaded, divide it into two balls. Cover each ball with plastic wrap. Place in the refrigerator for 1 hour.
Remove one of the dough balls from the refrigerator and roll out to a rectangular shape roughly the width of your pasta maker and about ¼-inch thick. Cut away the excess. Run the rectangular dough through a pasta maker at its thickest setting. Re-feed the dough into the machine at the medium setting. Then either feed the dough into the linguini-width cutter or slice by hand to the desired width. Hang the finished spaghetti strands to dry for 1 hour. Repeat with the second dough ball.
Fill a large stock pot ¾ of the way full, and bring the water to a boil. Add a pinch of salt to ample water. While the water is heating, prepare the sauce.
FOR THE SAUCE
Heat 3 tablespoons of oil in a small saucepan over medium-high heat. After about 30 seconds, add the garlic and the
chili pepper to the oil and fry lightly for 2 minutes over low heat. Remove pan from heat.
Put individual pasta bowls into the oven to warm.
Cook the pasta at a lively boil for 2 to 3 minutes (fresh pasta will cook faster than dried pasta). Drain the pasta, reserving a few tablespoons of the water, and return the pasta to the pot with the reserved water.
Pour the remaining 3 tablespoons of olive oil and the lemon juice over the cooked pasta. Add the chili-garlic mixture. Sprinkle in the lemon zest and parsley. Toss the pasta over medium-high heat for 1 to 2 minutes. Serve immediately in the warmed bowls. Grate Parmesan cheese over the pasta. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
The first bottles stacked in the store were approached warily by our customers. Like goldfish testing some new fish flakes sprinkled from above, they circled the displays and tentatively bought a few samples. Then, one by one, they started coming back. Again and again. By the time the
New York Times
’s
T Magazine
named it the “Downtown Red Wine” of the year that December, we already knew we had a hit.
chapter 7AGE
AGING WOULD SEEM
to be the most boring leg of a grape’s journey from vine to table. Who wants to watch a bottle sit in a damp cellar? But in the production of some wines, the cave is a veritable ant farm of activity.
For champagne, the cellar is for riddling, a labor-intensive way to consolidate dead yeasts and other sediment before their removal. The tradition was started by the griping of Madame Nicole-Barbe Clicquot about the cloudiness of her husband’s champagnes. Upon François’s death in 1805, his widow (the
veuve
) took over the company and decided to solve the problem by drilling holes in her kitchen table so that she could store bottles upside down. The veuve Clicquot’s idea was to let gravity push the sediment toward the bottle necks. Occasionally, she would rotate, or riddle, the bottles to shake down the residue. When the veuve was satisfied that the champagne was clear, she would remove the accumulated sediment by freezing the end of the bottle to form a plug, which she could then extract, leaving the rest of the wine intact (the
dégorgement
, or disgorging).
Instead of remodeled kitchen tables, most producers now use mechanized gyropalettes to shake and twist the bottles. A few champagne houses, such as Pol Roger, still hand riddle, a process also called
rémuage
. They store bottles neck down, at a forty-five-degree angle, in racks called
pupitres
. To riddle, a worker grabs the bottom of each bottle, shakes it, flicks it back and forth, tilts it up slightly, and then drops it back into the rack. He does this every few days for several weeks. The dregs, the lees, are then frozen and removed, just as Madame Clicquot prescribed two hundred years ago.
Yet for every champagne or first-growth Bordeaux that needs years spent underground, many—actually most—wines are meant to be drunk young. An aromatic New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc bursting with tropical fruit aromas will sag if kept for too long. A sprightly Sancerre will lose its bounce. Instead of getting deeper and richer with time, these wines just get flatter and more lifeless.
1 cs p&son, 99 john
2 cs p&son, 199 water
5 cs p&son, kasher
1 bt p&son, condé nast
10 cs p&son, boffi soho
T
HE DELIVERY SHEET WAS CRAMMED
. Things were humming. But Ryan was bummed: “Maybe we should just forget the rest of the selections and only sell Pasanella & Figlio,” he lamented. For an ex-som, I realized, much of the joy is in the hand sell, that time-consuming qualification of the customer
followed by explanations of the sommelier’s recommended choices. For our peripatetic wine director, watching streams of clients rotely scoop up the same wine day after day was disheartening. More traditional retailers would be ecstatic about a wine that sells itself. Ryan could hardly keep from moping.