Uncorked (20 page)

I was happier than Ryan but still sweating. Three months after we had received our first shipment of our own red wine, the first container of nearly 8,000 bottles was almost gone. We sold a lot to event planners looking for “chic pours,” as one told me. To our surprise, customers who ordinarily would buy one under-$15 bottle at a time were now ordering cases of our wine at $10 per bottle. Most unexpectedly, a few of our most demanding clients, such as the surly connoisseur who only bought specially sourced wines, were scooping up Pasanella & Figlio too. We would have to order more. And we were back on that SLA shame list again. We might have been done with our spending binge, but we still had to get over our fiscal hangover. Energized by our successes, I was determined to get us better capitalized. So I refinanced and finally set us on firm footing.

With spring ahead, we needed to expand our private label offering to include a white wine. Even before our first shipment of red had arrived, Roland and I had discussed developing another wine. I wanted a Vermentino, that classic Italian summer varietal and the perfect accompaniment to all the foods of summer. Although for me Vermentino conjured memories of seaside lollygagging, for Roland it just meant more work. “
Zehr difficile
” [“very difficult” in hybrid German-Italian], he told me. White wine grapes, the vintner explained, produce lower yields, the number of bunches of grapes per vine, than do most of the varietals used in red wine. The process is also more labor-intensive
than the one used for making reds. The grapes must be kept cool in refrigerated vats to preserve what Roland calls their “fresh aromas.” The fermentation is longer too, around four weeks versus ten days for reds. After fermentation, the new wine has to be recooled and held in specialized tanks.

I also was very specific about the flavor profile I was looking for. Rather than the heavier styles often produced in Tuscany and Sardinia, I preferred a cleaner, crisper sort that was more typical of what was made in cooler Ligurian climes. This meant that Roland had to be extra careful that the grapes did not overripen in the hot Maremman sun. He was game but insisted that I commit to another container.

Now, in the middle of January 2010, Becky and I returned to Italy to taste the new wine from the barrel. At that early point in its development, the cloudy juice tasted to me as much like apple cider as like wine. Yet if we were going to have the wine in New York by summer, we would have to make a decision now. Roland seemed confident that there was “nascent structure” that would ensure an elegant summer quaff. Becky and I were less convinced. Once again, it was clear, we were going to have to jump in and hope for the best. We would not be able to taste the wine again until it arrived at our doorstep in May.

Luckily, we had this lag time. As with our red wine, the label process was tricky. For wine made from the same vineyards and equipment as the previous red, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau insisted that we revise our wording from “Made from organically grown grapes” to “Made from organically farmed grapes.” I never was quite able to parse the subtle change, but I was not about to quibble with an insistent bureaucrat with the power to stall my shipment indefinitely.

After five years, we were ready to take another step toward maturity: supplying our customers with better shopping bags than our generic brown paper sacks with stickers that took eight hours a month to slap on. The quest for the perfect bag—chic, inexpensive, durable, environmentally friendly—turned out to be more difficult than making our own wine. Pretty bags are expensive and coated with nonbiodegradable sealers. Plastic-like bags made from corn were flimsy and tended to melt when exposed to liquids. I also suspected that bags made from corn produced on an industrial scale were really not that green if you took into account all that chemical runoff from those massive fields.

We started to focus on a nice reusable wine tote. Becky, Ryan, and I came up with a beauty: a custom canvas bag with leather tabs and trim, tasteful embroidery, and pockets to separate the bottles. But to break even, we would have to charge $30 apiece, plus our fancy reusable bag was made from bleached (read “bad”) cotton using Chinese (read “unlikely to be adhering to Fair Trade principles”) labor.

If only wine bottles weren’t so heavy and so fragile.

Tyler Colman (aka Dr. Vino) pointed out that the “greatest climate impact from the wine supply chain comes from transportation … primarily accumulated during the final product shipment to the customer.” According to wineanorak.com, if Britain switched to PET bottles for wine, the country would reduce CO2 emissions by ninety thousand tons on this leg of transportation alone.

However, plastic lets in oxygen, which over time damages wine. There are also concerns that harmful chemicals used in plastic manufacture potentially can leach out of the material and into the wine. Needless to say, plastic also looks cheap.

The Romans preferred amphorae: two-handled clay jugs. Plentiful and inexpensive, amphorae often were broken up when they reached their destination instead of being dragged back to their points of origin. In Rome, an entire hill, Monte Testaccio, is made of these cast-off pots.

In an effort to reduce bottle consumption, one importer sells his Côtes du Rhône in mini four-liter barrels. To eliminate all those containers completely, I wish we could bring over some damigiane (the equivalent of seventy-two bottles, traditionally one month’s consumption for an Italian family) and allow customers to fill their own bottles from the spigot. In Brooklyn, stores that sell beer let you fill your own growlers, sixty-four-ounce glass vessels that look like moonshine jugs. But selling wine this way is verboten in Manhattan unless you are a restaurant. Terroir, a wine bar in Tribeca, is one such place. They recently imported three thousand gallons of Riesling in a monumental bag-in-box. The sommelier fills your glass from a tap.

Despite their flaws, bottles still have their place. For ageworthy wines (albeit a very small percentage of the total wine consumed), cork-sealed bottles are best.

Not that corks are perfect. In our experience, about one in every case (approximately 8.5 percent) of conventionally sealed wine is “corked,” meaning it has a spoiled flavor as a result of a loose or cruddy stopper. Think about that the next time you take a perfunctory taste at a restaurant or pop open a Soave from the fridge.

Screw caps are not necessarily better, though they’re more sanitary than corks. Because screw caps allow so little air to escape, they can trap sulfur compounds, the rotten-egg-reeking preservatives found in commercial wines. The magic of a cork
is that it keeps oxygen from coming in while letting the sulfur fumes out.

Even if fill-it-yourself growlers became the de facto green packaging for customers; the wine world still would have much work to do to make the trip from vineyard to store more energy efficient. From our Eastern seaboard location, for example, it is greener for us to import a wine from France by boat than from California by tractor trailer.

The perfect solution would seem to be to buy local. If only New York wines were worth it. Before you start screaming at the page, let me explain. Despite its fundamentally unfriendly wine-growing environment (too damn cold), New York makes some decent wines. They just tend to cost too much. At $20 per bottle, the shopper has a lot of choices that deliver more bangs for the buck. For example, a Loire Valley Cabernet Franc, made where this varietal has been grown for hundreds of years, generally knocks the socks off a similarly priced Long Island Cabernet Franc. New York Rieslings, vinified from a grape that seems to fare better than most varietals in cold climes, are likewise disadvantaged. From Germany, I can source whites of similar quality for 40 percent less than the Long Island versions.

Of course, there are many who would disagree with me. New York growers often complain that the large distributors, who make no money on wine that can be sold directly from local producers, freeze them out of the market. According to the New York Wine and Grape Foundation, we do not see more New York wines on the shelves of New York stores because Southern and their ilk use their muscle to keep them out.

These allegations about hardball marketing may be true, although no distributor who saw New York wines on our shelves has
ever threatened me. The most intimidating thing about New York wines remains that they are too expensive, especially for products that have eliminated the importer and distributor middlemen.

In these complex circumstances, even the best intentions, such as going greener, get tricky when it comes to wine.

All of this led us back very close to where we started: a brown paper bag with a browner logo made from unbleached paper and vegetable dyes. Ryan told me that one thing was for sure: “We’ll never look at bags the same way.”

That year, Becky got another promotion: decorating and home editor at
Martha Stewart Living
. Good for Martha but not so good for Marco. Despite being better at tasting wine, managing employees, and discovering talent—not to mention picking paint colors—Becky was going to have to limit her role further at the shop. Instead of hearing her ideas (“How about a kids’ cooking series?”) or a better way to showcase our digestivi, I got e-mails titled “Becky Robertson thought you might like this item on eBay.” Becky unearthed amazing stuff, such as corkscrews hidden in keys and glasses wrapped in leather, but I rued that she no longer could pop in before and after work.

It’s one thing to turn one’s own professional life upside down and suffer through a renovation with one’s spouse. It’s another to fret together about one’s career, one’s home,
and
the shop. So now we shared concerns about Luca’s summer plans rather than about late deliveries of vermouth.

RYAN WAS BEGINNING
to agonize over everything at the shop. With the smoke clear from the previous year’s travails, he was prone to losing sleep about the smallest stuff.

“I’m really worried about our stapler,” Ryan confided to me one day. “Are you sure our ribbon is the right width?” he brooded on another. “See the mold?” he asked, showing me the battered end of an old glue stick. “Do you think we need to check the air-conditioner filters?”

I too was having difficulty managing the transition from crisis to calm. I missed the adrenaline rush of a start-up, the back-breaking, soul-stretching process of making something from the ground up. I yearned for the thrill of schussing down an Alpine pass—on a bike. For me, 2010 became a year in which I had to learn to embrace tranquillity.

At the same time, while I chafed at the predictable rhythm of morning deliveries and evening sales, I relished that I now had the time to pop upstairs for lunch with Luca. And I did not miss for one minute watching the news at 4 a.m.

In the larger wine world, subdued grumbling had replaced outright panic. Reps were still struggling with the decline of restaurant sales. Retailers, they occasionally let slip, continued to be cautious. On one of his now infrequent visits, Armando boasted about the great success they were having in New Jersey—code, I believed, for “business in the city is still lousy.” Things were eerily quiet on the big distributor front. Were Southern and Empire doing a little riddling of their own?

With Ryan’s aptitude for food and wine pairings, we started a regional wine and cheese series with famed the New York cheesemonger Murray’s. For each series, we picked four villages from which we sampled local products. At every tasting, we guided guests through six to eight cheeses and the same number of wines. Focusing on small areas, we found, gave us a way to explore the history and traditions of particular places, making learning about
wine less intimidating and more fun. For us, the wine and cheese tastings were more comfortable than chasing down bank bigwigs for semilegal events. Bread with cheese was considered an “unassailable tidbit” according to my attorney, Stew Burg. “As long as,” he added, “the cheese supplier does the slicing.” With the locavore movement in full swing, the series allowed us to show that “local” means “more than from the North Fork of Long Island.” For us, local is not just about geography but also about culture. And our customers were so much more engaged than in a typical Wine 101 class, where uninspired selections are washed down with stale baguettes and bricks of Brie.

In the process, Ryan the ex-musician found another way to entertain. The series were attended by so many of the same young women that John and I often teased Ryan about his groupies.

Now we just had to keep it going.

Thankfully, at the same time, another source of enthusiastic customers emerged directly across the street. The New Amsterdam Market set up shop in front of the main vacant fish market building across from which Vinnie and Carmine had stood for so many years. Once a season on a Sunday, the market set up across the street to showcase cheesemongers, artisan butchers, tea purveyors, and chocolate producers, as well as a guy who drove from Maine every time to make lobster rolls and a chef who turned spit-roasted pigs into delicious porchetta sandwiches. It was thronged. The foodies also loved their wines. Sleepy Sundays now felt more like holiday weekends.

With the sales floor in Ryan’s expert hands, our enoteca became one of my favorite places to work. I often sat at a desk nestled in a corner, just within earshot but out of sight. I got a kick out of the fly-on-the-wall perspective on daily comings and goings.

A tennis ball would roll by my feet every morning around eleven o’clock. Then a wirehaired dachshund would dash in and scoop it up. Up front, the dog’s master would chat with Ryan as he tossed the ball. The dachshund would dart under displays and bark at everyone who entered, but I still looked forward to the ten-minute catch sessions. I was happy to see the dog, who reminded me so much of our Guendalina, in the store.

The dachshund was not our only regular four-legged visitor. There was the bow-tied gentleman with the two pugs. The striking blonde with the majestic Great Dane. The aging hipster couple and their pair of English sheepdogs. The jock with the Lab. The German shepherd who nuzzled open the door for his laid-back master.