Uncorked (14 page)

In New York, Neal Rosenthal is one of a handful of these importer-tastemakers (who include Joe Dressner, Peter Weygandt, and Michael Skurnik, though some contend that Skurnik has grown too big to be quite as much of a guarantee) whose names are synonymous with quality. Each one has his niche. Rosenthal is well known for a French-heavy selection of offbeat winemakers. His prices are a little higher than those of some of his competitors, but his wines are captivating. A Rosenthal wine is always a discovery.

In 2010, I finally visited Rosenthal at his home-cum-headquarters in Shekomeko, New York. After five years of doing business together, Neal had invited me to lunch. Saddled between two Dutchess County horse farms, his converted barn has been modernized with weathered steel and cherry cabinetry. The
house is immaculate, like its owner. A sixty-four-year-old with a thirty-one-inch waist, Rosenthal is lean and focused and not at all the ebullient R. W. Apple of my mind’s eye. Lunch consisted of three things: a bowl of artisan pasta, half a homegrown heirloom tomato, and two one-third glasses of 1996 Brovia Dolcetto.

The fastidiousness of its preparation was mesmerizing. I watched Neal carefully unwrap the artisan pasta and delicately plunge two fistfuls into the boiling water. He gingerly scooped three spoons per bowl of imported tomato confit into each bowl. I must have smiled when he cut the half tomato at the table, as I imagined Lisetta would have been hysterical watching such measured precision. I was also intrigued by his calculated choice of wine. Dolcetto often is considered a pleasant but throwaway wine from the Piedmont region, which is so revered for its Barolos. Neal, it was clear, wanted to let me know that he could surprise me with a judicious choice, a consciously nonblockbuster red that would be more impressive than a run-of-the-mill 95-point
Wine Spectator
selection. And it was. At the end of the meal, Neal opened up a cabinet filled with rows of beautifully packaged honeys that he also imports. He reached for a jar. He unscrewed the top. We sniffed: chestnut. “Almost too intense,” he told me. He put the jar back into the cabinet. He reached for another: acacia. “Sunshine!” Then Alpine wildflower. “Floral, crisp.” The aromas were complex, like wine bouquets. In all, we smelled eight honeys. Neal did not ladle out a single spoonful to taste.

Throughout lunch, conversation was cordial but restrained. Part of it, of course, had to do with the awkwardness of two strangers. Who was I but some small retail account in one of the six states in which he distributes? Aside from a brief diatribe on the importance of proper storage of wine from the vineyard
until the wineshop, I couldn’t tell you one thing Neal said. There weren’t anecdotes presented to enchant. There was just Neal Rosenthal, the long-distance runner who is exacting, driven, and restless. I discovered that he was not destined to become my lifelong friend, but I am glad he is looking out for the quality of the wines I buy from him.

Looking back, I wish more of my wine-related meals had been so restrained. During that second crush year, we often were invited for magnum-draining bacchanals that we had not yet learned to refuse. I was starting to groan from all that bonhomie. According to our records, Becky and I bought 479 bottles of wine from the store that year. Sure, we had guests at our place, but that is still a lot of alcohol. I was heavier then, too, 183 pounds on my slight five-foot-ten-inch frame. As the year ended, we were laden with debt. And although we weren’t exactly going backward, we weren’t going far enough ahead to make a real dent. We were bloated and anxious. I had imagined that renovating a building and caring for a little boy and starting a new venture and leaving a familiar livelihood would be challenging. I was, though, beginning to feel beaten down.

Life at Cannizzaro seemed to be mirroring our stress: Lisetta’s memory was faltering. She was losing interest in food (and not even making her famous salt). My father was tired too. Even Luca, our gentle son, was scraping through his terrible twos. As the year ended, sales were up, but spending—and strain—was up higher. My 3 a.m. mantra was “Will we make it?”

chapter 5

A
FTER TWO YEARS IN BUSINESS
, everyone told us we were home free. If we had survived the first twenty-four months, the period in which 90 percent of new ventures fail, we were told we’d be on easy street. Well, not quite. At the end of 2007, before the economy started tanking, our wineshop, which had been featured in so many magazines and named to so many top-ten lists, took a radical turn for the worse.

It started with Janet. Of course, Becky and I were still agonizing over our talented but troubled wine director. Janet was
passionate and driven; she knew so much about wine, and she loved selling. “So she borrowed our car without permission?” we asked ourselves. So she wrote herself an expense reimbursement check without telling us? So she disappeared for two extra weeks in Burgundy after we had given her a plane ticket? Even making out with Armando at our holiday party could possibly be excused. But we saw a pattern we could no longer deny.

We were terrified of letting her go. Janet had so many rare qualities. How, Becky and I wondered, would we ever find someone to take her place? Despite having had the shop for two years, we still felt like wine world outsiders. “It’s not like we’re going to find her replacement at Whole Foods,” Becky added.

But under the pressure of the impending holiday season, we could tell that Janet’s heart was no longer in her work for us. She didn’t bound into the store, bursting with excitement over an impending delivery of Côte Rôtie. She didn’t regale us with stories of great wines she’d tasted the night before. She no longer made lists of potential fat cat customers. Instead, she withdrew.

The time had come, we realized, to part ways. When we sat her down, Janet seemed relieved. We were less so. Janet had been with us since the beginning, in mid-2005. She had known Luca since birth. Now she was leaving, and we were going to have to move forward on our own.

Becky organized a going away party. Because Christmas was approaching, we gave Janet some money to tide her over during the winter months. There were some heartfelt good-byes.

Then, with the holidays upon us, we had to get back to work. The end of the year is important to every retailer, but especially to wineshops, which can average 60 percent of the total year’s gross in the five weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve.

Three weeks after Janet’s send-off, one of my in-laws forwarded me an e-mail wine solicitation he had just received from the “Thoreau Wine Society.” It was signed by Janet.

Over the next few days, former design clients, college chums, and regular customers started asking me about Janet’s new venture. Was I involved? Could it actually be the same Janet Hoover? Yes, it was. That was the familiar writing I had edited while she was on our staff.

Janet, it turns out, had cleared out more than our cache of Savennières, a Loire Valley white prized among oenophiles, when she left. She had lifted our mailing list! And now she was selling wine to my customers. I guessed that she hadn’t realized the significance of what she had done. I sent her an e-mail explaining that a mailing list was property and that using it amounted to theft. The next week, she sent out another solicitation. I tried to put it out of my head. Two weeks later, Janet did it again. I told her that in addition to breaking our employment agreement,
she was selling alcohol without a license and could get into big trouble. But her newsletters kept coming.

Becky and I were stunned. With our long history and her well-managed exit, we wondered what would compel Janet to ignore us. To sue her seemed like overkill. We just wanted her to stop. But how?

Then I made my first big mistake. I called the State Liquor Authority in the hopes that she would listen to them. I imagined that they would give her a stern warning about breaking a rule, and that would be it. But after reviewing her e-mails, the intake officer told me that this case was out of his jurisdiction, as she did not have a liquor license. The authority, he explained, could take enforcement procedures only against licensees!

Meanwhile, our business was swamped. Our fifteen-year-old Volvo station wagon was not cutting it. Even with 178,800 miles, the car was indestructible, but the logistics were unreal. To make a delivery to
Condé Nast
, for example, we had to go through two layers of security in the building’s basement before being allowed to drop off a package, a forty-minute ordeal if we were lucky enough to find a spot in the loading dock next to Times Square. Otherwise, one person (usually me) circled while the other, usually Suzanne, ducked in with the delivery. In 2006, one law firm ordered 175 bottles of champagne to be delivered to ninety-seven different locations. Multiply each gift by forty minutes and you can start to imagine what we were up against. In the end, we had to messenger hundreds of bottles individually, sucking up the $9 delivery cost. Like most other wineshops, we typically mark up only 15 percent on a bottle of champagne, so we were losing $1.50 on each bottle we schlepped around town.

Strewn with Styrofoam shipping containers, piles of ribbon,
and huge bags of foam peanuts, the enoteca was fast becoming a dysfunctional Santa’s workshop. On one side, John, our stalwart wine salesman, was busy tying hundreds of ribbons. I sat behind six-inch stacks of UPS labels. Becky came in after work to organize and inspect every shipment before it was sent. And every other night there was an event run by Suzanne for which it all had to be put away. It was chaotic but exciting, like being among the runners on the floor of the stock exchange. At the end of each day, Becky and I dragged ourselves upstairs to our apartment, exhausted but still high from the bustle. We were enervated. No, we were stoked. And invariably, Luca, his baby-sitter, and our dog, Guendi, were nuzzled against each other and sound asleep.