Uncorked (7 page)

Janet had a great palate, and I enjoyed sharing in the blind-tasting miracles, but more and more I was realizing that they were more the result of common sense and practice than the hand of God.

By late fall 2005, a little divine intervention would have been appreciated as we continued to languish in liquor license purgatory. Janet was starting to get antsy. With her to-do list shrinking, our dynamo started arriving a little later each day. In the afternoons, she disappeared to meet distributors, ostensibly to taste more wines. Inevitably when she returned after several hours, flashing those purple teeth, I would be irritated. “Kid,” I thought to myself, “you’re getting tipsy on my dime.” Then again, I reasoned, she needed to sample as much as she could to be the best buyer for me, so I held my tongue.

In the worst-case scenario, I was okay with our having spent months tasting (not exactly an unpleasant way to pass one’s time), but I had promised myself that I would not start construction until I knew we had the license. Yet we desperately wanted to open by the holidays as Jude had let us know that 60 percent of a shop’s annual sales come between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve. Pressure was mounting. I was starting to feel like a cane on a vine that was yet to sprout. I realized that if we waited any longer, we would miss the lucrative holiday season. So we leaped again.

I quickly submitted plans to the buildings department. While I waited for the permits, I hired someone to smooth out the pitched floor—great for washing away fish guts but not so nice for tile. The more he chiseled, the more we discovered just how badly the concrete tilted. It soon became clear that we would have to jackhammer the whole floor to get it smooth.

With my fifteen years of practice in design, you would have thought that I could be a better manager of the construction process. That was the point at which I should have said, “Let’s just wait until we get the approval.”

Instead, we continued jackhammering until one of our tenants dialed New York City’s 311 complaint hotline to report a building on the verge of collapse. The inspector made a beeline for our place and told me what I already knew: I was no longer making a repair but putting in a new floor that would require a demolition permit. I had to stop immediately and pay an I-do-not-want-to-remember-how-much fine.

When the stop work order was lifted, I proceeded to make matters worse. Concerned that my two-man crew would not be able to finish the store by December, I phoned one of the carpenters with whom I had worked at the Maritime. The “sailor,” as he was called, had made the curtains for the Manhattan Japanese restaurant Matsuri by tying nautical knots. I needed a guy with that kind of ingenuity. And the sailor was cool. He had traveled the world by boat, opened a restaurant during one of his layovers in Paraguay, and kept a yawl in City Island. He was an accomplished carpenter and an inveterate spinner of yarns, no doubt honed on those long ocean voyages. I was smitten.

Within days after giving the sailor a deposit, it became clear that in addition to being a world-class seaman, he was a big mistake for this job. The mariner loved to sail but, apparently, not much else. A boat bum, he took advantage of every freebie, drinking bottle after bottle of the Poland Spring we had stockpiled upstairs. The seafarer would disappear at lunchtime and return with bloodshot eyes. He would make a big show of walking around with some piece of molding and then take a couple of hours to cut it in half. Despite his facility with things nautical, the sailor did not really know the first thing about creating a watertight storefront. In fact, he forgot to install the weatherproofing.
The seaman’s cohort, a Vespa-riding hipster, it soon became apparent, was similarly unmotivated and semicompetent. My back was against the wall.

Just as the store was starting to come together, the city announced that the fish market would be leaving by the end of the year. “It’s done,” Vinnie notified me one day as I stood outside the building, waiting once again for the sailor to show up. “We’re finally moving.” “When?” I asked. “Two weeks. That’s it.” Vinnie seemed in no mood to talk.

I felt caught. Although I was relieved to be rid of that 4 a.m. racket and thrilled not to have to hop over puddles of snapper guts, I was sad about losing the fraternity of fish guys who had adopted me and was depressed at the prospect of an eviscerated neighborhood. In its waning days, the market workers were listless, too. The ice man, the forklift operators, and Pushcart Annie, who for more than fifty years sold black market cigarettes from her shopping cart, seemed to be dragging their rubber boots more slowly over the fish scales, crushed ice, and discarded packing straps that littered the streets.

For 183 years, the market had managed to remain in place even though the fish no longer came there by boat. It had outlasted fifty-seven mayors. It had survived 9/11 and Giuliani and fifteen years of city announcements of its pending move. Now its time had come. At sunrise, on their last morning, I saw Vinnie’s hulking lieutenant, his scruffy beard hidden under a weather-beaten balaclava, staring out toward the river with a tear streaming down his cheek, just like the stalwart Native American in the 1970’s littering commercial.

A week later, a fat envelope—the kind you want to get when you’ve been accepted to college—arrived containing the liquor
license. It was going to be a while before I came through on my promises to visit the fish guys in the Bronx. With two weeks left until the year’s end, we decided to open up a small part of the store while the rest of the space was under construction. A few days before Christmas, with many bottles covered in dust and in the middle of a transit strike, we cracked open the door. We were in business at last.

chapter 3

“J
ANET QUIT,”
B
ECKY
whispered to me as I lined up the last bottle on a display. Three hundred guests (including friends, former clients, Martha Stewart, and Florence Fabricant of the
New York Times
) were arriving in ten minutes, and we had no wine director for the grand opening of Pasanella & Son. Becky knew I would freak, and so she calmly delivered the news in her best soothing voice.

“She what?! You’ve got to be f’ing kidding!” I screamed as I backed into the display.

In the movies, accidents always seem to happen in slow motion. In our case, what followed was an instant smack of glass against tile and a simultaneous explosion of Nero d’Avola. The display collapsed, and the table laden with rosemary focaccia was sodden; sharp slivers had fallen onto the hand-sliced salumi, puddles were forming around the front counter, and my opening-night shirt—the silky Italian one I had worn for our wedding—was spattered with the inky Sicilian red.

It was February 2006, many notable New Yorkers were arriving at our doorstep for the unveiling of our new venture, and our whiz kid wine director was not to be found. But given the bleary-eyed late morning entrances and extended afternoon MIAs, it shouldn’t have been a surprise. The eight months it took to get the store up and running had tried Janet’s patience. As a bike messenger, she had been able to bomb down the street to get the job done. At Whole Foods, she just needed to carve another hunk of Parmigiano to finish the sale. In contrast, our new
venture demanded planning and patience. With her impulsiveness stymied, our speed-talking wine buyer was bouncing off the walls. We should have known.

With the public relations firm’s clipboard girls and their plug-in headsets arrayed in front of the store, ready to check in the expected throngs, this was no time to philosophize. What I needed was a mop.

We all pitched in, and within minutes the store looked pristine once again. The room was soon full of cheerful bonhomie and the hearty laughs that come from fine wine, tasty food, and good company.

In addition to the tables laden with six-foot-long focaccie, we set up a few games. In the enoteca, we laid out “Spin the Salami.” Lucky winners got to kiss Becky, and losers got to peck me. Toward the front of the shop, we set up a mirrored chessboard with wineglass playing pieces (white versus red) that I had made. There were piles of creamy Gorgonzola, translucent slices of salumi, and mounds of grapes.

We had even arranged with Pietro Romanengo, a Genovese candy maker that first opened its doors in 1780, to fly in an impeccably presented assortment of candied quinces, sugar-coated orange peels, and chartreuse cordial drops.

All the expected notables showed, including some from the wine world. There was the chortling older gentleman gorging on amuse-bouches and washing everything down with Côte du Nuits. There were a few bearded hipsters, sniffing and spitting and dissecting each selection with their wine-stained fingers. There were neighbors, friends, acquaintances, and semistrangers. Everyone was grinning. At the end of the night, Becky, rolling up the chocolate-brown waxed paper tablecloths, and I, munching
on remnants of zucchini pizza, glanced across the banged-up flower arrangements and mountains of half-empty glasses and gave each other high fives with our eyes. This crazy, happy night was exactly what we had dreamed of—only better.

We felt so good that we actually accepted Janet’s plea to “un-quit” the next day. In subsequent weeks, there were newspaper mentions and blog posts. Six months after we opened,
New York
magazine named us “Best Neighborhood Wine Shop.” The most otherworldly accolade that followed was an eight-page feature in
Food & Wine
titled “An American Lives the Tuscan Dream,” which opened with a cheerful family portrait: an angelic six-month-old Luca flanked by his radiant mother and me, paunchy but beaming. The article described the charmed life of our young family. It made no mention of the mortgage or the fish smell.

While the press flowed, we had to get back to work and I had to learn the wine business. I was ready to hang a silver cup around my neck and hop a flight to Paris. I fantasized about spending my days moseying from vineyard to vineyard, finding wines for the store. Friends thought I’d be devoting my time to rooting around moist eighteenth-century caves looking for hidden stashes of 1961 Pomerol, coveted Bordeaux from one of the legendary vintages of the twentieth century. Or I would be lurching from one wine-soaked, three-hour vineyard lunch to another, tasting, toasting, and, occasionally, napping.

As if.

The truth is that winery visits are more ceremonial than necessary. Yes, producers tend to welcome me warmly, particularly if we’ve been selling a lot of their wine. But I don’t make big deals among ancient oak barrels, nor do I discover caches of legendary
vintages in cobwebbed cellars. Instead, I buy from sales reps who show up at my shop with flight attendant luggage filled with bottles of sample wines.

In New York, wine and liquor are sold through a three-tier system: winemaker sells to distributor (1) who sells to me (2) and then on to you (3). If the wine is foreign, it must come through an importer, which adds yet another link in the chain. With their Prohibition-era roots, the Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) laws were intended to ensure the state its share of taxes by using a wholesaler to guarantee their collection. Officially (we’ll get to that part later), wine can only be sold through wholesalers by these traveling salespeople.