Uncorked (6 page)

As her belly grew, so did our anxiety. Among the biggest open questions: Who were we going to get to run this money-sucking enterprise? Then, as if scripted, came a fateful encounter on a last-minute run to Whole Foods.

I was preparing for Becky’s thirtieth birthday and ran out to pick up a loaf of bread and a few odds and ends. I left Whole Foods with more than $200 worth of cheese thanks to the energetic sales clerk behind the counter.

“You know that Tomme would go perfectly with a bottle of slightly chilled Chinon,” she suggested. “I have a fresh wheel in the back.”

“Okay,” I murmured.

She continued: “And that Burgundy you mentioned would be amazing with a Pavé d’Auge!”

“How do you know all of this?” I asked as she bent down behind the counter and I noticed a pair of tattooed wings on her back.

“Oh, I worked at Acker and Sotheby’s,” she replied, lifting up the wheel.

The rest is a blur of farmstead Cheddars and artisan robiola. I left feeling charmed—and a little bit fleeced.

The day after Becky’s party (where the pairings were a huge
hit), I returned to the cheese counter and asked the cheese whiz, Janet Hoover, if she would be interested in helping me set up a wineshop. “Just a part-time gig, but—” At which point she practically tore off her apron and leapt over the counter.

I set up a small office on the second floor, in the room where the fish guys used to have the knife-studded and cash-strewn table. With demolition below and the fish market in full swing outside, the environment was chaotic, but Janet was driven. We had never heard someone rattle on more quickly about point-of-sale systems, delivery trucks, and must-have wines. Janet’s to-do list was six pages long and in a constant state of revision, studded with yellow highlights and Post-it note addenda. We were alternately awed and exhausted by her fervor.

One of Janet’s first triumphs was to introduce us to her beau, Jude Wessex, who was head of auctions for a large wineshop and auction house. Jude was invaluable. He shared spreadsheets that revealed the inner workings of a great retail store. Jude and Janet told us where the money was made (cheap Pinot Grigio), what percentage of our budget should be for Chianti (not much), and how long it would take us to turn over 100 cases of vodka (about a year and a half).

Jude invited me to my first wine auction, which was held at New York’s Cru restaurant. As Janet and I made our way past the eatery’s Fifth Avenue entrance, we were ushered in as if we were Beyoncé and Jay-Z. Besides Janet and a vaguely familiar, bone-thin Russian model, the room was filled with puffed men with I-know-better-than-you swagger. It was like being at a high rollers’ table in Las Vegas. The food was extravagant—foie gras, caviar-stuffed beggar’s purses—and ignored. The wines were serious and
also, apparently, took a backseat to the action, which consisted of idly thumbing through the glossy catalogue as you glanced at who was at the other tables. Janet had prepped beforehand (perhaps with help from Jude) and had her wish list and ceiling prices ready to go. We bought $5,000 worth (a pittance for the real players) but came home with some rare and desirable wine for the store: The Maiden from Harlan, among the most coveted California Cabernets; Two Hands Lily’s Garden, an Australian wine with a cult following; Vieux Château Certan, a perennial Bordeaux heavy hitter; and Feudi San Gregorio Serpico 2001, a “staggeringly rich” (according to famed critic Robert Parker), almost impossible to source, 98-point-rated southern Italian red.

Gamesmanship aside, it also became clear that provenance was a critical factor in determining value. Many of the lots belonged to the “cellar of an esteemed collector,” which meant that they could have just as likely been sitting on someone’s kitchen counter for years before they were consigned. Real insiders knew who was an “esteemed collector” and who had been given a Christmas bonus he never drank.

Through Jude, we also found a Manhattan liquor attorney, Stew Burg, whom we hired to shepherd our license application. Arriving at Burg’s office, I introduced myself to the receptionist through a Plexiglas barrier with a hole in it. A few minutes later, a slightly shambling figure emerged. Burg is retained because of his connections to the New York State Liquor Authority board members. Jude told us that you hire Stew because he has those commissioners in his pocket.

So I did what Stew told me: I got myself fingerprinted and photographed, paid $1,000 to a bond company (still not exactly
sure why), attached a lease, appended a store diagram, and submitted a notarized statement from me (landlord) vouching for me (tenant) along with the fifty-two-page liquor license application (a form designed to ferret out mobsters with questions such as “Have all investors been disclosed in this application? Yes or No”) to the New York State Liquor Authority. The SLA website explained that we should expect to wait about three months.

Meanwhile, we had our hands full. On June 17, 2005, Becky gave birth to our Luca, the “Son” in Pasanella & Son. And for most of the summer we were more preoccupied with milk (and diapers) than with wine. Luca’s thirst also meant that my most trusted taster was out of commission for three months.

In August, almost three months to the day we applied for the liquor license, I got a call from Stew announcing that we would be required to appear at a perfunctory hearing the following week. At the hearing, our seasoned liquor attorney explained, he would get up and describe why it would “serve the public interest” to open our store. Up we trekked to 126th Street and Lenox Avenue, the headquarters of an agency responsible for $206 million in annual tax revenue.

The hearing room featured a long table with tented legs behind which sat the board. Before us was an earnest couple looking for a license for their organic restaurant and a grocer seeking a beer license in Queens. They all were nervous, and both were quickly approved. When our turn came, Stew did his three-minute spiel about this young couple looking to open a wineshop in their own building in Manhattan’s Seaport Historic District. As Stew made his way back down the aisle, one of the commissioners offhandedly asked, in the manner of a minister at a wedding, “Any objections?”

Hands shot up. A trio of downtown liquor store owners with handwritten scripts rushed to the podium to protest that we would put them out of business. Their comments were peppered with “9/11” and “Ground Zero.” Our shop, they argued, would be the “final nail in the coffin.” One speaker in particular, the son of a package store owner, was so moving that he even had me choked up. I almost forgot that his father’s place, a block from the former World Trade Center, was almost a mile away in lower Manhattan, where the population density hovers around 750,000 people per square mile.

There were murmurs among the commissioners and then the announcement: “License deferred.”

“Deferred?!” I screamed in my head.

Stew nodded and said nothing.

Where, I wondered, was my tireless advocate, my Atticus Finch? Where, I wanted to know, was my friggin’ Mr. Inside!?

We limped out of the meeting, and I was convinced that what Stew called a “hiccup” was going to require some real work on my part.

It was remarkable that none of the commissioners were from New York City. To these upstate guys, I realized, almost a mile seemed pretty close.

I asked Janet to take our video camera and walk at a normal pace from our building to the two nearest liquor stores. She left our cobbled Seaport Historic District, crossed Water Street, and went up the hill and through the canyons of office buildings. Twenty minutes later, she reached the second store. I sent DVDs to each commissioner. Again I waited.

Weeks passed. The delay was probably not due to bureaucratic ineptitude. What we did not know was that the SLA had been
drafted by the attorney general to assist in a major investigation of the local wine and spirits business. In November 2005, Eliot Spitzer, the ardent New York State attorney general, launched an inquiry into unfair wholesale pricing.

Spitzer alleged that the major distributors offered discounts and free merchandise to preferred stores as well as to favored bars, restaurants, and nightclubs. The minor payola, the attorney general contended, included gifts such as iPods and vacation trips. The big numbers were funneled in more creative ways. Large retailers, I later learned, had set up shell marketing companies to receive payments for ads in their mail-order catalogs. If you saw a full-page spread for a name brand in a store circular, chances were that it was a paid advertisement. Spitzer also alleged that some wholesalers bought gift cards from those customers ($400,000 worth in one case).

Although the investigation was good news for small retailers like me, secretly, I was less than horrified by what it had revealed. Practices Spitzer described as dastardly (“Kickbacks!” “Payola!”) sounded pretty mundane when I thought of them as discounts and perks to preferred customers. Not surprisingly, the big guy was getting the best price. As the
New York Sun
argued in a November 14, 2005, editorial, these deals may be unsavory, might even be illegal, but certainly were not as criminal as, say, Medicaid fraud.

That fall, while Spitzer was rounding up bad guys and we were waiting anxiously for the license, we started drinking with purpose. We may not yet have had the official go-ahead, but we had a store to fill and had to figure out what to sell.

It soon became clear that Janet, the daughter of a religious
studies professor and a pious mother, bowed to one God: French Burgundy. One of the first times we tasted with her was on the second floor amid the stacks of computer boxes, the unopened cash register tapes, and the scattered wine cases. On top of her paper-strewn desk, she uncorked a 1999 Armand Rousseau Gevrey-Chambertin, an excellent year for a signature wine of an esteemed winemaker. And if what followed was not exactly seeing the eye of God, it was an epiphany.

Janet poured and swirled.

And lingered.

She closed her eyes.

She coddled the glass.

She inhaled and sighed a half dozen times.

Becky and I looked at each other dumbfounded. “
This
is who you hired?” I could hear my wife silently asking.

But the smell—no, the aroma—was captivating. Woodsy, mushroomy, and wet, it reminded me of walking through the chestnut forests behind our house in Italy. More oohs and aahs followed after her first sips. We dived in. I was really concentrating. It was complicated. The taste was feral but refined. For the first time, I was listening to a wine. And all of a sudden it occurred to me: this is sexy. Becky was smiling too.

For someone used to washing down
tordelli
(a Tuscan meat-filled ravioli) with a back-slapping Chianti, the first real tasting was a lot like discovering another virtual room. I had been drinking wine all my life but had never really tasted it until this point.

There’s an industry saying that it takes eight years for a wine drinker to mature from predominantly cheap and simple Australian Shiraz to almost exclusively expensive and nuanced French
Burgundy. In the five years that have passed, I have discovered many wines that I like as much as, but none more than, a fine Burgundy.

Over time, our tastings became more frequent, and occasionally as compelling, but one thing was soon clear: Becky has a much better nose than I do. She could down ten Pinot Grigios and pick the best almost without thinking. Even though I had grown up in a wine culture, had read all those wine books (Hugh Johnson’s encyclopedic
Atlas of Wine
, the equally exhaustive
The Oxford Companion to Wine
, Clive Coates’s
Wines of Burgundy
, and all the Robert Parker books among them), and wanted to be good, I still lagged behind her. I could pick the coolest or the most revered wine, but I could not tell you the best. My palate was color-blind: I could make out the outlines, but I was missing the substance.

It didn’t help that Janet was soon taking me to dinners among the wine-obsessed, where she inevitably would show off. One of her favorite parlor tricks was to blind taste a bottle in front of a group of wine collectors and then identify not only the region and grape but also the winemaker and the year.

At a dinner in the Chelsea loft of a pianist and his companion, we were treated to a harpsichord recital while bottle after bottle was swaddled in cloths and laid out in a line on the dining table. By the time the recital had finished, I stumbled to my chair, having reached my two-drink limit (yes, this liquor store owner is a cheap date). Janet, who had downed the same two glasses of Chablis, was raring to go. The first bottle was full-bodied, red, ripe, and deep. I could taste the fruit. Janet took a few swirls and took a stab: “Rhône, possibly Crozes-Hermitage.… ”

Then a few more sips. “Chave, 2001!” she declared, flashing
purple-stained teeth as surely as if she were saying her own name.

That is exactly what the pianist revealed when he took the cloth off the label.

Whoa.

With a few years’ hindsight, Janet’s apparent miracle now seems more Sherlock Holmes than Amazing Kreskin. With practice, grape varietals offer telltale signs: Cabernet Franc, for example, tends to be herby, Zinfandel is peppery, and Syrah, the predominant grape in a southern Rhône wine, often tastes deep and full-bodied with hints of what critics like to term “black fruit” (plums, currants). Janet also may have been tipped off by the bottle’s shape, with its long, sloping shoulders. Then again, Australian Shiraz (another name for the same grape) can come in a similarly shaped bottle, although the Shiraz tends to be made in a more extroverted style. Syrah is garrulous French; Shiraz is loud Aussie. Janet probably could have excluded the Australian, as well as its so-called “New World” (any place other than Europe) brethren, because there was just a hint of the oakiness that often characterizes these wines. Knowing that the hosts were avid collectors and assuming that the wine was delicious, it was not a far leap to assume that they would have bought from one of the most renowned of that region’s producers, Jean-Louis Chave. Janet could also tell—as a novice wine taster also would be able to recognize—that the wine was old enough to have lost its mouth-puckering tannins but not so old to have turned brownish. Finally, 2001 was also a terrific year. And so, voilà.