Uncorked (22 page)

“J
UST WANT YOU TO KNOW
that I’m not much of a hugger,” my brother said to me as we started down the ramp to the hospital mortuary. I had just gotten off the plane from New York after receiving the dreaded middle-of-the-night call. I was terrified. I expected to be led to a refrigerator drawer where an orderly would unzip a bag to let me say good-bye to my father, just as they had when my mother died on the same day a year earlier in New York.

But this was Italy. On the bottom level of the Renzo Piano–designed Italian hospital, there was a skylit room labeled “Arch. Giovanni Pasanella” reflecting respect for my dad’s architect status. In the middle of the room, under a veil with “Comune di Viareggio” crocheted at the bottom, was my father, already in a white-satin-lined coffin, in one of his nice suits, wearing his beloved pair of John Lobb deerskin boots. He was cleaned up with a nice shave and combed hair, but you could tell he had not been embalmed. There was a slight discoloration around his hairline, and his jaw was slightly slack. Otherwise, he looked just like the guy who only a few days before had sent me pictures of himself and friends at a Christmas lunch by the lake in Torre del Lago.

For someone who had always told us, “When I’m gone, just spread my ashes over our
uliveto
[olive grove],” he probably would never have imagined that the hospital would have taken so much care. But laid out in such dignity, under the skylight by a famous architect, I’m sure he would have appreciated this unexpected pause on the way to the crematorium. He certainly
would have been touched by the visitors: from the hospital’s head of cardiology to the flowers and touching note written by our housepainter.

In one fell swoop, I lost my father, my strongest tie to the past, and my single most important inspiration for the path I have chosen. What was I doing in the vino business if not trying to capture a little of the stardust that had been his life?

The urge to turn away from Italy and the associations it conjured was stronger when we returned to the house. The place felt haunted. The Sri Lankan woman who had been taking care of my dad said as much. She told me that in the two weeks leading up to his death, she had glimpsed a shadowy black ball in his bedroom when he was out. She had even seen my father sitting in his study when she knew he was at one of his dialysis treatments. “With this eye,” she said, gesturing, she had seen it all. She had confided all this to her husband in the days leading up to his death. Now she was a mess.

Ironically, our province of Lucca had been planning a retrospective of my dad’s life and work for the coming summer. He was one of several creative people (the founder of the publishing house Mondadori and the art critic Cesare Garboli among them) who had found inspiration in our town of Camaiore. So I was more or less forced to start going through his things.

On his desk was the latest volume of the journal in which he had recorded thirty-five years of every meal (excluding breakfast). A full 25,550 times, he listed what he ate (funghi trifolati) and what he drank (Avvoltare ’01) along with a seating chart. Overlaid onto the meals are a series of color-coded lines and shapes that I have yet to decipher. Other than the date, the
menu, and the dining companions, there are no other details in his diary.

Nonetheless, for me this catalog articulated everything that inspired my journey into wine: the communion, the curiosity, the hedonism, even the obsessiveness. Was I really going to turn my back on all that?

But did I really expect to capture that magic by stocking a store full of Pinot Grigio?

The year before I opened the shop, I was asked to moderate a discussion of what it means to be Italian. Panelists included the president of Giorgio Armani, the restaurateur Mauro Maccioni, the Rome-based architect Kevin Walz, and Germano Celant, a well-regarded Italian art critic. My chief qualification seemed to have been authorship of a book called
Living in Style Without Losing Your Mind
.

After some self-congratulatory revelations about knowing how to live life well, plus a little American bashing (we are too confident in our correctness; we tend to see things in black and white), the panelists confessed that underlying all that cheerful bonhomie was pessimism. Riven by infighting and corruption, the panelists agreed, Italy is stagnant. Hopeless. The living well part is more like Nero’s fiddling, a what-the-f expression of a fatalistic worldview. Being Italian, the group concluded, is not so much about cavorting in the Trevi Fountain with Anita Ekberg (the Swedish star of Fellini’s
La Dolce Vita
) as about realizing that we’re all going down, so at least we should enjoy ourselves along the way. Expecting cheerful nuggets of Italian sunshine and good fortune, the audience looked a little shocked.

So was I.

I’ve always been an uncomfortable poster boy for Italianness. Sure, I read
Diabolik
(comic mystery novels) and know every movie that Laura Antonelli ever made. I have family, friends, and a family house in Italy and even a local accent. I have an Italian passport. But I’m never going to be Italian. I am always going to be seen and, to some degree, feel like an outsider.

I’m an Italian-American. Not in the red sauce or checkered tablecloths sense. Nor in the street-smart Martin Scorsese drift. Or even in the jolly Mario Batali vein. I love the Italian culture, history, and sensuality, much of which I can savor through wine. And as a native New Yorker, I see possibilities. I believe that if you work hard, you will succeed. A rich daily life is important for many Italians, but for me it has to add up to more than an endlessly repeated series of satisfying experiences. I want to move forward. I like to build. I guess the panelists would call me too optimistic to be truly Italian.

Since my dad passed away, I miss sharing life’s little discoveries with him. Every once in a while, I’ll reach for the phone wanting to know what he ate last night. One day, excited to have met the new owner of his pal Minuccio Cappelli’s vineyard, I dialed the first digit before I realized my mistake. Yet my dad’s death energized me. I returned to Cannizzaro three times in 2011. With each trip, I felt more confident, more eager to embrace the future actively.

PINK IS MY NEW FAVORITE COLOR
. Six weeks after our May target, our rosé finally arrived and sold briskly. We had planned on stocking the store with our third Pasanella & Figlio wine just
before Memorial Day, but more label delays pushed the delivery to end of June, effectively cutting off one-third of our summer selling season.

That we have even dared to make our own rosé reflects just how much tastes have evolved in the few years we have been in business. Previously, pink wine had been seen as enjoyable but forgettable, a pleasant by-product of summer, like salt-sprayed beach hair or a tan.

Some traditional rosés are still literally leftovers. Called
saignée
, these rosés are made from juice bled off from red wine vats to make the red wine more concentrated. In the last ten years, modern producers have gravitated toward the direct contact method in which rosé is the goal, not a by-product. These purpose-made rosés derive their pink color from limited contact with the pigment-filled skins. Considered the most prestigious, oenophiles call them
vins gris
(from the French for “gray wines”). The Italians calls them
rosati
(“pinks”). As we watched case after case move out the door, we just thought of them as bread and butter.

We’d like to think our success was due to the wine’s flavor. To avoid the slightly sweet rosés that are often typical of warmer Italian climes, we harvested our Cerasuolo grapes early. As a result, our rosato was bursting with fruit but bone dry. It’s possible, we imagined, that the wine’s brilliant ruby color seduced our customers or that our black label beckoned “Drink me.”

The quick sales even could have been due to the advance public relations work of a Seaport character, a semihomeless ex-chef with a generous imagination. “You know,” he had been telling neighbors since we opened, “Marco makes an excellent blush!”

One thing was for sure: The rosé’s triumph was not due to press coverage. Unlike our red wine, the rosato’s debut came unannounced. I had a feeling that we had built up enough trust among our customers to let them spread the word. The
Times
writer who had raved about our Sangiovese in her review bore out my hunch: she bought a case of the rosato for herself and told us how much she loved it. Better than an official endorsement, her personal enthusiasm was valuable and much appreciated. For her, we were not just a good story; we produced wine worthy of her own house.

More than anything, rosés conjure up relaxation and beach picnics, garden lunches, and lakeside barbeques. At ten bucks a bottle, the dream came alluringly cheap.

At long last, the image of the laid-back vintner was starting to reflect the reality. From my perspective, the wine world looks better too. With the growing consumer interest (American wine consumption is up 40 percent in the last fifteen years) and ever greater sophistication of many of the producers, I see the coming years as very exciting for our customers. “There is now just so much good wine,” I hear a lot of the reps complain, fearing the increased competition. Hard times may be ahead for winemakers as a result of continued overproduction, but wine drinkers will benefit from better wines than ever before.

Over the last five years, our customers also seem to be in a better position to take advantage of these expanded offerings. They have become both more discriminating and more adventurous. They have flocked, for example, to the delicate wines we have carried from Aosta, the northern Italian region nestled in the Alps, and lesser known varietals such as Schioppettino, a
native red varietal grown in Friuli near the Slovenian border. Leaning toward lighter, more elegant wines could be a lingering effect of the movie
Sideways
(“I’ll have a [lean and elegant] Pinot Noir”), but I prefer to see it as a sign of a maturing consumer public.

In particular, I have noticed a backlash in the higher price ranges for wines that are made in an overly modern style (think big California Cabernet but from Tuscany or oaky Chardonnay but from Friuli). More and more, our customers want the real thing. They want authenticity: the wines with stories and histories, not just good branding campaigns. “Give me a Barolo that tastes like a Barolo,” one of our regulars said to me the other day.

I don’t want to overstate the case. Bold and expensive super-Tuscans are not dead, and people still stream in looking for a bottle of insipid Santa Margherita Pinot Grigio, the “most requested imported wine, red or white, in US restaurants,” according to its importer, Terlato Wines International. But our customers seem more sophisticated than perhaps even some producers realize. Reps still overwhelm us with extra-fruity and highly alcoholic (and often very expensive) wines made for an American public whose tastes are moving on.

A customer came in and asked me: “Chardonnay’s over, right?” I looked back a little dumbfounded. What did he mean? True, Chardonnay has long since been passed by Sauvignon Blanc and Grüner Veltliner as the thing to order when you sidle up to the bar. But Chardonnay, I felt like telling him, was the original noble grape. White Burgundy, arguably among the best wines in the world, is made exclusively from this storied varietal. Chardonnay,
he should also know, is a very versatile grape that can be vinified (turned into wine) in many different styles. The minerally, crisp version is typical of Burgundy. The oaky, buttery iteration is more old-school Napa. By Chardonnay, did he really mean those white wines whose vanilla overtones are as overpowering as hazelnut coffees? If that’s what he intended, then, yes, I would admit, tastes have changed. The heavy-handed Cali Chard has gone the way of the Hummer. Chardonnay, I wanted to tell him, is here to stay. But before I could even stammer a word, he had picked up a bottle of our Vermentino white and headed over to the register, a choice against which I could hardly argue. Next time.

From my view behind the register, not only is Chardonnay alive and well, so are a lot of other varietals too. “Thrifty Napa types,” as Ryan calls them, and new wine drinkers seem to gravitate to the robust and inexpensive South American wines. Among our customers, “Malbec” seems to have become code for “California Cabernet Sauvignon at half the price.”

At a wineshop that sells some liquor, one of the biggest surprises has been the rise in demand for American small-batch whiskeys. Dwarfing gin, port, rum, and vodka sales combined, high-end American whiskey now constitutes 30 percent of all our liquor sales.

One reason may be that these spirits are authentically American creations. Our whiskeys and bourbons (made of corn aged in oak barrels) have clearly identifiable house styles and stories to match. Kings County Distillery for example, bills itself as the “Brooklyn’s oldest continually operating distillery since Prohibition,” which, they hasten to add, means that it has been in existence since April 2010.

The New York whiskeys also owe their popularity to locaholics—customers who like to drink stuff made close by—as well as to the rise of cocktail culture. Customers clamor for a good mixed drink.