Uncorked (5 page)

Later, as I learned more about Rosso di Montalcino’s more famous brother, Brunello, I used to wonder why my parents were so cheap. Only years later did I realize that the less venerated but also less astringent Rosso was a much tastier everyday wine in addition to being a much better value. Make no mistake: properly aged Brunello, one that has had time for its mouth-puckering tannins to soften into a deep and voluptuous wine, is still one of my favorite treats. But it’s the kind of thing I would drink during a romantic tête-à-tête, not with pesto on a weekday night.

Those whom Lisetta loved were equally enrapt with her. In years past, people would start to show up around six o’clock for
aperitivi
. There were writers and poets, painters and sculptors, art critics and museum directors, the foundry owner, the handsome veterinarian (Lisetta loves animals), and always, it seemed, a few kids and someone’s elderly
zia
(aunt). On the weekends, dinner was usually for fifteen but could just as easily be for thirty.

At those three-hour meals, wine was hotly debated, but no more than, say, the quality of olive oil or the tastiness of someone’s
ragù
. It was part of the same thing, which in turn was just a delicious excuse to bring people together.

Of course, there were some standouts, such as the time my father and Minuccio Cappelli, a Chianti vineyard owner and one of his best pals, shut themselves in the kitchen all day with a few bottles of Cappelli Riserva. What I remember more than the extraordinary food (Marchese Cappelli was called the James Beard of Tuscany) and the passable wine (just because you’ve had vineyards for three hundred years doesn’t make them great) was their muffled chuckles behind the kitchen door and, later, our smiles as we feasted on the fruits of their labor (a titanic cacciucco).

I was not always so gung ho about Italy. When I was a boy, my dad used to send me up the hill to get fresh milk from the farmer. “Why don’t we just buy milk in a store like we do in the States?” I’d complain. Nonetheless, every day, I dutifully hiked to the
fattoria
(farm), empty Cynar (an artichoke-based aperitif popular with the older set) bottle in hand. Arriving at the stinky barn (the dairy cows were kept inside in the belief that idle animals made sweeter milk), I’d hold my breath and watch the farmer squeeze the udders and squirt the steaming liquid into the bottle. As soon as he was done, I’d hightail it out of there, sticky bottle in hand, determined never to return. Corn flakes, I should point out, do not taste good with warm milk.

Of course, now I look back on the early morning milk treks with enough fondness to reminisce about them and with the realization that my dad had been on to something that Italians have known all along: the beauty of everyday life lies in rituals like these.

I also fondly remember simple lunches under our pergola, like the ones we continue to have when we visit: fried zucchini blossoms, fried cod, fresh caciotta from the remote Garfagnana area of northeastern Tuscany, a few leaves of salad from our garden drizzled with a few drops of our own olive oil, a bowlful of tiny and incredibly fragrant wild strawberries, and a glass of light Camaiorese red. I wanted the wineshop to embody this easy relationship between wine and food and sociability. The only trick was finding a way to underscore that connection without illegally serving food and wine in a retail store!

Becky and I decided to forgo extra storage in favor of creating an
enoteca
, or tasting room, in the rear of the wineshop. With thirteen-foot ceilings and heavy beams, the space already had good bones. From a local quarry that used to supply bluestone for the sidewalks of New York, we installed a bluestone floor and
added pairs of steel French doors that open onto a small garden on which my mother-in-law lavishes attention.

When I was young, I had always dreamed, as many New Yorkers do, of opening up the closet door and finding an extra bedroom that I had never known existed. Off a boarded-up street and tucked behind the store, the enoteca became that secret hideaway.

Our fondness for Italy is how I rationalized the choice to put a car, my 1967 Ferrari 330 GT, in the middle of the store. Yes, plunking a sixteen-foot-long vehicle in the middle of our selling floor made no real economic sense. But with its wire wheels and wooden steering wheel, the 1960’s Ferrari symbolized a carefree, dolce vita dream—exactly how the store should feel and, in my mind’s eye, what I wanted my life to become. Home above, store below. Working with wine at my fingertips and a dog at my feet.

As a child, not everything I learned about wine was from Italy. My mother, a New Yorker by way of Baltimore, loved good wine but hated pretension. At our home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Mom preferred Gigondas, the hearty Rhône red, to its more famous neighbor Châteauneuf-du-Pape; white Burgundy Meursault to more headline-grabbing Montrachet; Beaumes de Venises to the more prestigious Sauternes. She liked to appreciate the overshadowed, and this may explain why I feel comfortable offering under-the-radar wines in the store.

As my father spent more time in Italy with Lisetta, Mom encouraged experimentation. In the 1970s, she allowed her ten-year-old to collect
digestivi
in miniature bottles and to “taste test” thimblefuls of those bitter herbal concoctions side by side.
I think she’d smile if she knew that thirty years later I would still be playing a version of that game.

My mom was also the only non-wine professional I have ever met who could recite the Bordeaux Classification of 1855, the five-tiered wine-ranking system.

Although she had advanced Alzheimer’s disease by the time we conceived of the store; Mom’s informed, but relaxed, approach to wine pervades the place.

Becky’s boss, Martha Stewart, reminds me a lot more of Lisetta than of my mom. Both Martha and Lisetta meld bluntness and brisk efficiency with a sense of style and a captivating persona. Yet both women melt around animals. Coincidentally, Martha used to rent a house in Camaiore, our tiny Italian town.

I don’t want you to get the wrong idea: despite her being my wife’s employer of more than ten years, Martha and I are not exactly bosom buddies. But her point of view permeated our store vision almost as much as Lisetta’s. Martha edits. She hones. She is relentless. With over twenty-four thousand domestic and international wines available in this country, we knew we had a lot to sift through. And we would have to be as demanding as Becky’s boss.

The other Martha message, by way of Mies van der Rohe, the modernist architect, is that details matter. It’s not enough to have a hazy sketch of an idea. You must fill it in with the same conviction as the big picture. Martha is why we use the perfect saddle-stitched chocolate brown grosgrain ribbon to wrap bottles; why we have a cork business card that’s also a magnet; why our gift cards are engraved with calligraphic fish.

One of the most attractive qualities about Martha is her insatiable curiosity. She loves an expert and will ask question after
question, as Ryan Ibsen, our wine director can attest. She’s a great interrogator and can sift quickly, probe, find the secret. For Martha, we reminded ourselves, every day is an opportunity to learn more.

We had a lot to learn about wine and also, as it turns out, about parenting: in October 2004, we discovered that the co-founder of our soon-to-be shop (Becky) was pregnant with a boy. At least our dream now had a name, Pasanella & Son.