Uncorked (16 page)

Because I am his daughter’s pal, Lorenzo tore himself away from charming a table of Russian oligarchs (the bread and butter of this resort town, Forte dei Marmi) to teach me, the rookie wineshop owner, how to “taste” by smearing my hands with Domaine de la Romanée Conti—one of the most expensive wines in the world—and then pressing my nose into my wine-soaked palms. Chiara stood by with one of those forced “there-goes-Dad-again”
smiles. Then Lorenzo launched into a romantic fish story that involved tanned
bagnini
(lifeguards) pulling in nets at dawn. My father and Lisetta, familiar with the tales, decided to start home without us.

On the drive back home, Becky and I described our favorite dishes. I was still gaga over the wine experience. She rhapsodized over the delicate fish pasta. “Now, that’s something I’d like you to know how to make at home!” she exclaimed.

As we entered Cannizzaro, the phone was ringing; it was a physician at the Versilia hospital. “You should come now,” he advised, and then hung up.

We saw my father and Lisetta lying side by side on gurneys. They were holding hands.

My dad had fallen asleep while driving on the way home and had plowed into a car dealership. The car was totaled, and he never drove again. Thank God, they were okay.

Within another month, in July 2008, we returned to New York to say good-bye to Guendalina, our wire-haired dachshund and my parents’ wedding gift to us. At five, our beloved pet and symbol of our union developed pancreatic cancer.

Not long after the summer of 2008, I started to notice that Becky and I were drinking too much. For a long time, I think we rationalized it. We were having wine with dinner, just as we did in Italy. We willfully ignored the fact that the country wine we sip by the Tyrrhenian Sea is lower in alcohol (8 percent) than the higher-brow selections typically sold at our store (14 percent). Only Amarone, the beefy Venetian red made with dried grapes, neared 14
gradi
(percent) when I was growing up. “Too heavy,” Lisetta used to say whenever my father opened one of these “holiday” wines.

Our consumption was inching upward. What had started as a bottle split between the two of us had crept up to one and half and then two (a white for the starter and a red for the main course) and then culminated at two entire bottles of wine, plus digestivi.

When friends were over, our drinking spiked further. We’d enjoy a glass or two while cooking, have another couple with hors d’oeuvres, and then taste several different bottles with our guests.

What began as a civilized way to enjoy food and wine somehow had morphed into a daily stomach-swelling bacchanal. Becky and I were falling into bed, barely having brushed our teeth. I was sleeping fitfully. Too often, we awoke to empty bottles overflowing our recycling bin—and to my growing double chin.

“This is my job,” I told myself. “Just my way of dealing with the stress.” In addition to my parents’ deteriorating health, the renovation was dragging and we were just barely keeping up with the mortgage. Worse, the store was posted frequently on the dreaded SLA blacklist, a shame roster of retailers who have taken more than thirty days to pay a bill. Reflecting both Prohibition morality and distributors’ self-protection, state law requires that all alcohol purchases must be paid for within one month of delivery. Go a day over on a single bill and the wholesaler is obligated to report you to the state authorities. This is more crippling than shameful: listed retailers must pay cash on delivery for all subsequent shipments from
every
wholesaler until they are caught up. For an undercapitalized and semiorganized store like ours, the results were almost fatal. We had to continue to pay bills as we wrote out checks for more inventory, doubling our cash crunch.

I discovered that spending all that money was easier upstairs against the backdrop of the Brooklyn Bridge, one of my original
inspirations for buying the building and another beautiful folly that turned out okay in the end. On one check-heavy day, I parked myself on the sofa a few feet from Luca, who was happily drawing with a crayon. I smiled thinking about father and son working side by side and went back to my computer spreadsheet. A few minutes later, I looked up. To my horror, Luca had continued his scribbling over the wood columns next to the sheet of paper. The yellow scratchings over the newly sandblasted wood looked like they could have been done by a drunk Cy Twombly.

“Luca,” I yelled, “how could you?”

My son turned to me and deadpanned: “I’m sorry, Marco, but I’m just two. You should be watching me.”

“You’re right,” I admitted to the wise old man masquerading as my toddler. If only you were old enough to work in a wineshop.

My brother Nicky told me not to worry. “At least you’re not in suburban Washington [where he lives]. For us, this recession is a friggin’ disaster. But New York,” he said confidently, “will never get hit hard.”

No wonder I was hitting the sauce.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only one having a hard time.

The New York wine world was also in tumult. Southern had bought Paramount Brands in the previous year and then dissolved it. Armando was out of a job. Lovable Matt moved back home. And Janet, we heard, discovered more than Pinot Noir in Burgundy. She met a man and decided to stay. Despite the move, her e-mails kept coming.

As the recession deepened, the sales reps’ desperation reflected a larger tanking of the overall business. Some, it became apparent, were hurting even more than we were. Not surprisingly, restaurants and high-end merchants were the most affected.

The winemakers were getting frustrated too. As disaffection spread, they started jumping from distributor to distributor in a veritable
Jersey Shore
of bed-hopping. Even to those in the trade, the changes were a blur. Adding to the uncertainty about sales, we often weren’t sure from whom to buy what.

Southern found that doing business in New York was more difficult than in its native Florida. There were lots of parking tickets and union truckers with $120,000 salaries. According to Matt, Southern had underestimated the “appeal of the underdog.” New York wine buyers liked “scrappy guys with small portfolios selling stuff that you could find nowhere else.” New York wineshop owners pride themselves, Matt explained, on being inside and ahead of the curve. Despite its extraordinary portfolio of some of the world’s most sought-after wines (like Burgundy’s Morey, the Rhone’s Beaucastel, and Alsace’s Domaine Weinbach), Southern was snubbed by wine buyers who associated it with Yellow Tail, the immensely popular Australian wine that tastes like grape juice mixed with wood shavings. “Crass and commercial,” store owners snipe as they grudgingly phone in more ten-case drops of Absolut vodka and Patrón tequila. In New York, Southern had nowhere near the 50 percent of floor space it typically commanded in other markets. With more than three hundred distributors, New York City has a lot more small guys with interesting wines than a state like California, which has only six distributors.

That same year, 2008, Robin Goldstein revealed on his blog,
Blind Taste
, that
Wine Spectator
, the most widely circulated and influential wine magazine, had given an “Award of Excellence” to a nonexistent restaurant in Milan. Osteria L’Intrepido was actually
the creation of Goldstein, who submitted a fictitious application to be considered for the prize.

There was a huge outcry: “Hypocrites!” “What a farce!” said posters on the online bulletin boards. “The art of winemaking can do better without Corporate America’s money-grubbing influence.” There were confessions. On the
Dr. Vino
blog, one restaurant owner fessed up: “The award is meaningless but serves a purpose.” “For a mere $250 a year, I get an award and my restaurant name listed on a nationally recognized website … press and recognition, all be it [sic] maybe only to the less informed but which make up probably a 80 percent share of my business. You find me another advertiser that does that for $250.”

In retrospect, such fuzzy journalistic practices should not have been so surprising. Five years earlier, Amanda Hesser had reported in the
New York Times
that the
Spectator
had received 3,573 applications for Awards of Excellence and had doled out 3,360 commendations (for a 94 percent rate of excellence). All a restaurant had to do was submit a wine list, a sample menu, and a brief description of its wine program along with a $175 check. Except for eighty-nine winners of the magazine’s top honor, the Grand Award, all were lauded sight unseen. As of 2008, the
Times
also reported that the fee had gone up to $250 and the glossy magazine granted four thousand awards, adding up to more than $1 million.

With its myriad 90-point wines and fat advertising revenue, America’s premier wine magazine was not new to rumblings about its editorial independence. The discovery of this apparent pay-to-play scheme confirmed what shop owners had long mumbled to themselves as they stuck rows of shelf talkers promoting
yet another
Wine Spectator
—blessed wine. In the
Spectator
world, as in Garrison Keillor’s fictitious Lake Wobegon, every wine seems above average. Some wineries, which may or may not have bought the adjacent full-page ad, were even better than that.

In my preshop life, I was an assiduous reader of the
Spectator
and an enthusiastic seeker of its “Best Buys.” Call me naive. But the numbers gave me confidence. Only later did I start to understand the dramatically flawed, albeit well-intentioned 100-point rating scale.

Of the 100 points available, Robert Parker, the influential wine critic commonly credited with creating the system, uses only 50. Every wine no matter how bad gets 50 points. The rest are graded in minute, single-point increments. Tellingly, Parker explains his system as just like college: 90 to 100 is an A, 80 to 89 is a B, 70 to 79 is a C, and below 70 is a D or F, “depending on where you went to school.” The British wine writer Jancis Robinson uses a 20-point scale, just as the English do in their schools.

Needless to say, scores also depend on who is doing the reviewing. Parker tends to prefer thick, rich, and ripe wines, a style that seems to be going out of favor. A 2008 comparative study of Bordeaux ratings conducted by the Center for Hospitality Research at Cornell seems to confirm that the
Wine Spectator
and Stephen Tanzer, whose
International Wine Cellar
is also a highly influential review, march in lockstep with Parker. Robinson is Franco-centric with a few colonies such as Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa thrown in. Claret, what we call Bordeaux, is their holy grail. And many wines seem to be judged with this worldview in mind.

To add to the confusion, the same wine can taste vastly differently as it ages. I remember tasting a 2004 Domaine Leflaive
Montrachet with the renowned Burgundy critic Clive Coates in our enoteca. In 2006, it was lean and tight in a mildly unpleasant way. The wine’s most pronounced characteristic was its mouth-puckering acidity. But Coates was able to use those faults to imagine what the wine would taste like in a few more years. The strong acidity, he predicted, would mellow into a deeper riper wine that still retained a crisp minerality. When I retasted the wine in 2009, I realized that Coates had been right. That stingy Chardonnay had blossomed into a huge and enormously satisfying wine. And, of course, bottle variation and the taster’s mood can also skew a wine’s rating.

From my perspective, four letters may be more helpful than 50 disguised as 100. They get you in the ballpark (i.e., A—once in a lifetime, B—big celebration, C—nice everyday wine, D—kind of crummy); the rest is where you and your preferences come in. A four-tier system seems to work for movie and restaurant reviews; why should wine be judged any differently?

It’s easy to understand why a wine drinker would be tempted to follow straightforward rankings after reading much wine writing. Critics tend to talk in a shorthand that’s intended to communicate an experience by using a universal vocabulary. Ironically, the result can be a metalanguage almost inscrutable to the outsider: “Notes of Oriental saddle leather?” “Black fruit?”

At the major seasonal tastings where distributors gather all their producers in a room, one invariably hears a wine geek giggling as he describes a Sauvignon Blanc as smelling of “cat’s piss,” a coded compliment that’s supposed to show how inside you are but really ends up sounding kind of lame. Or someone will exclaim (just loud enough to be heard across the aisle), “Dirty socks!” while sipping a woodsy and very pricey Burgundy. In this
topsy-turvy world, occasionally a hipster will shout, “That’s hot!” which ironically is an insult, as “hot” wines are said to have too much alcohol. Imagine several hundred tipsy Trekkies wandering around a
Star Trek
convention and you get the vibe. Initially, we tried to bring some of these metaphoric descriptions to life by offering tastings that paired wines with the things they were said to taste like. For instance, we put cherries next to a cabernet that was said to have cherry aromas; we paired plums with Syrahs; we even found some gooseberries for Sauvignon Blanc. But it always felt as if we were trying to describe the taste of grapes by using some other food. We asked ourselves: “Why can’t grapes taste like grapes?”

Some of our most successful wines (based on sales and customer feedback) garner comments that avoid fancy descriptors altogether. Our best-selling Sancerre, by Vacheron, has always been described as “Catherine Deneuve if she were a wine.” It’s oblique, yet our clients seem to get what we mean: elegant, refined, timelessly chic, if perhaps a bit chilly and remote.

Things started to turn around in July when we found our new wine director, Ryan Ibsen. A former sommelier whose résumé included two years at the New York restaurant of a world-renowned chef, Ryan brought a trained nose and a welcome professionalism. I would like to say that we found Ryan by soliciting recommendations from celebrated sommeliers and venerated distributors and by word of mouth or that we contacted the nation’s best wine programs and inquired about their most talented graduates. We did all that. But we found our ace new wine director on Craigslist. Nearly 225 résumés later (along with butcher, sommelier seems to have supplanted DJ as cool job du jour), Becky and I met Ryan. A lanky Northwesterner, he had spent
the last seven years as a sommelier in some of the best-known restaurants in Seattle (and before that he’d toured with his band for seven years). And he was tired of nights ending at four in the morning followed by days starting a few hours later. He was sick of all those “Yes, sir’s” and “Right away, ma’am’s” taking back perfectly good wine when a large-bellied oaf barked, “This is crap!” Soms, he sighed, spend an awful lot of time putting together wine programs (their lists) only to have customers pick the most or least expensive bottles while ignoring the rest of the offerings. “I’d spend months finding the feather-light Nebbiolo from the Valle d’Aosta [in the Italian Alps] only to have everyone order Sancerre.”