Uncorked (21 page)

Dog people, it turns out, tend to be good customers. The treats we keep in a jar on the counter might help.

Sometimes the action took place right in the enoteca, oblivious to my presence.

“Honey, look at this room!” the soon to be bride exclaimed to her fiancé as she strolled into the enoteca, the back room that we originally envisioned as storage. “How about we get married here?” she asked. Over the next few months, the nervous bride called Ryan dozens of times. “Sure, we can help you with the flowers.” “Try Bowne, the engravers around the corner.” “Yes, we have plenty of candles.” “No problem. We have room to store a walker.” Honed by years of restaurant service, Ryan soothed every worry. He seemed happy having problems to tackle. The wedding went off without a hitch.

After I overheard another smitten bride, I started to fret about our accidental wedding chapel. What about the SLA? Were they going to arrest us for mixing wine with wedding vows? As usual,
Becky reassured me: “I don’t think they’ll put us in prison for mixing wine with wedding vows.” “Besides,” she added, “aren’t you flattered that people come to our shop and see their future?”

We have since had sixteen unions in our tasting room, including Becky’s best friend, as well as several dozen receptions and rehearsal dinners. I hope that’s okay with Inspector Watts.

BACK IN ITALY
, life was also settling into a more placid phase. After twenty-five years, Lisetta moved back into her own house to get more help with daily life. She now spent her days strolling around her garden, content and well tended. My father slept there every other day, but secretly felt relieved that someone could take over the responsibility for her care. Meanwhile he painted and continued to enjoy great meals and wonderful wines with good pals. He even took up smoking the occasional Cuban cigar. Hearing about his culinary adventures always got me reenthused about the store.

As the weather warmed, he was increasingly curious, as we were, about our Vermentino. Foolishly, we had changed shippers in an effort to save a little money. The new guys always answered the phone with “Marco who?” and could never tell us where our wine was in its journey. With spring just around the corner in New York, I no longer obsessed over boiling wine in Port Elizabeth, New Jersey. Instead, my gooey wine nightmares were centered on cloudless Livorno, where the wine had been taken from the vineyard. Was it now baking under the hotter Mediterranean sun while waiting for a ship to reach port? Had they parked it in a temporary storage facility? Was that place at least temperature controlled? My calls and e-mails were unanswered.

Still sitting in its steel container, the shipment appeared on the back of a semi that pulled up in front of the store ten days later. The trucker quickly unhooked the trailer and dropped it in the parking lot across the street. “You got two hours,” he yelled out his window before he drove off in the cab.

Atop an even bigger and messier pile of boxes, Ryan and I repeated what was to be a ritual. This time the outcome was clear from the start: the Vermentino not only had survived the journey, it was delicious! I felt like cooking up a fritto misto, a seaside staple of fried mixed seafood, on the spot. If only I could stand.

“
YOU GOTTA SEE THIS!
” the thirtysomething guy yelled to his friend as he dragged him inside. “They’ve got a Ferrari in the store!” Then, with unvarnished childlike disappointment, “What happened to the car?”

A version of this scene happened every weekend since I sold the Ferrari two years earlier. With the business back on the rails, I thought it might be time to get another crowd-pleasing store fixture. But not another slick sports car. The world had changed. I had changed. Instead of sexy, I wanted something humble yet cheerful. In light of our increasing deliveries, I also thought the ideal car would allow us to save some money on messengers. What I found was a variation on the bare-bones Fiat on which I had first learned (and subsequently loved) to drive: a 1964 Fiat Giardiniera. Powered by a tiny 500-cc motor that produces a wheezy seventeen horsepower (but gets almost seventy miles to the gallon), the poky Giardiniera was popular with Italian nuns when I was growing up. Pale blue, with a piped red vinyl interior
and a roll-up canvas roof that runs almost the length of the car, the pint-sized station wagon is also adorable. Besides, it was way easier to roll in and out of the store than the Ferrari and required no more maintenance than a lawn mower.

One trip over the Brooklyn Bridge, creeping up the ramp with my foot on the floor as cabdrivers beeped and gestured all around me, was enough to convince me that this underpowered teddy bear of a car would be more comfortable in the store, where it remains, than on the road. Our customers still fling open the doors with the same excitement but now wow their kids rather than their buddies.

Armando also seemed to be bouncing back. His new company was booming. But under the surface, there were machinations there too. One day he left another vaguely ominous message: “Call me. It’s about Janet.”

Again?

He gave her a promotion.

No, he made her a partner.

Yes, that’s it: Crazy Janet is now going to be an unavoidable presence in the New York wine world.

Damn.

“Thanks so much for returning my call,” Armando said.

“Sure,” I responded.

I paused. “Here we go,” I thought.

“It’s about Janet,” he continued.

“Uh huh,” I mumbled.

“I had to …”

He paused.

You’re killing me, Armando.

“I had to let her go.”

Geez. He knew what I had told him. He had seen her in action. Now he was burned. I felt badly—at least until he asked: “By the way, got any time for me to taste you on some great new values we’re bringing up from Argentina?”

You had to give him credit for relentlessness.

AS OUR FIFTH
Christmas season ramped up, we noticed that the champagne business itself was experiencing underground changes. Until then, two words had been synonymous with holiday cheer: “Veuve Clicquot.” There was the fresh-faced financial analyst who enunciated every syllable with her junior year abroad accent. There was the contractor with the standing five-case holiday order who asked, “You guys got my Voove yet?” Everyone seemed to equate this well-known brand with end-of-year good times. With its elegant script label, Veuve seemed less commercial than Möet. It was also less expensive that Krug and less hip-hop than Cristal. Nonetheless, in 2010, the chant for Veuve became a whisper.

Did they flock instead to inexpensive bottles of Prosecco, the Italian sparkling wine? Did they scoop up the more obscure Crémant d’Alsace, a bubbly white from the Franco-German border? Were they clamoring for Spanish cava? Not really. Granted, we still sold a lot of Prosecco and other sparklers to the more adventurous, but champagne drinkers stuck to their preferred holiday beverage. Herein lies the big deal.

Ninety-seven percent of exported champagne is made by a handful of large conglomerates (Veuve Clicquot, Mumm,
Möet, Piper-Heidsieck, Perrier-Jouët, etc.) that buy rather than grow their grapes. In recent years, these winemakers without vineyards have begun to compete with grower-producers, farmers who make their own champagne. For us, 2010 was the year that grower champagne sales overtook Veuve Clicquot and their ilk.

Grower champagnes have become startlingly popular in part because they tend to offer greater value than the name brands. For the price of a mass-produced bottle available in any duty-free shop, buyers can get a true artisan creation made of hand-sorted grapes and hand-riddled—maybe even on kitchen tables as the widow Clicquot had more than two hundred years ago. As proof of their extraordinary care, some RM (short for
récoltant manipulant
, or “grower/producer,” listed on their labels) add little or no sugar to their wines. “Dosage,” as it is known, can be used to mask the bitterness that comes from stems and other dross that can be swept into industrial harvesters.

Although we had been championing these artisan champagne makers, such as Egly-Ouriet and Pierre Gimonnet, for five years, Ryan and I both realized that small does not necessarily mean better. Ryan put it bluntly: “If the grapes suck, then the champagne does too.”

Larger houses have the flexibility to buy from different sources to ensure a consistent style, even in weak vintages. Bollinger, for instance, favors a robust flavor that smells like hot biscuits, whereas on the other end of the spectrum, Perrier-Jouët strives for a leaner, crisper taste.

Grower champagnes bring more variation from winemaker to winemaker and year to year, making our work harder but also
more rewarding. Per Se offers Pierre Gimonnet as its house champagne. In light of the fact that their sommelier was one of our customers, did they discover this gem from us? We hope so.

All in all, 2010 was shaping up to be the most happily boring year so far. We paid our bills. We expanded our selections. We solved some nagging issues. Ryan stayed out of trouble. With my Spartan drinking and enthusiastic bike riding, I dropped almost thirty pounds. Becky followed suit, eliminating her multiglass segues into postwork relaxation. Holiday sales were up 20 percent.

Then, on December 31, 2010, my dad died.

chapter 8