Uncorked (2 page)

As a wine lover with many interests, it should come as no surprise that Thomas Jefferson, president/​architect/​botanist/​inventor/​writer/​oenophile, is my god. But I was more wowed to learn through his diaries that as ambassador to France, Jefferson took several solo monthlong wine excursions to savor, learn, and experience. If I couldn’t hope to match his many talents, at least I could aspire to his level of curiosity.

Wine, I soon discovered, is perfect for people who like to explore: history, biology, anthropology, geology, geography, even philosophy. The deeper you dig, the more you find. My friend Jan D’Amore discovered why grapes are so easy to grow at the resuscitated Odoardi winery in Calabria despite the locals’ pessimism. Two thousand years ago, the Romans had tended vines on the very same site and had described a felicitous microclimate.

Chalky soil explains why that Sancerre is so minerally. Vines trimmed in a double-Guyot (flat-topped) probably are growing in Bordeaux.

No wonder wine attracts so many geeks—it’s easy to get drawn in by the minutia. There are legions of statisticians and numbers-obsessed oenophiles who attempt to quantify an essentially unquantifiable experience by assigning it some standard measures and rational explanations. I see the temptation.

But I love the mysticism even more. How can, for example, the well-educated consulting winemaker to a number of Italy’s top producers honestly tell me that one gram (
¹
⁄
₂₈
of an ounce!)
of ground-up cow horn spread over twenty-two acres of vineyard led to worldwide recognition of his fledgling vineyard? Is he crazy? Or am I?

Wine, I also realized early on, appeals to people who like secrets. Whether it’s hedge funders determined to be more inside than their peers or the people who like
The Da Vinci Code
, wine aficionados tend to like mystery. And wine seems to demand a special knowledge. But the truly devoted seek more: they want to be clued in to the stories behind the labels, like that illustrious Burgundy producer now being eclipsed by his wife’s much younger lover whose rescue of a once-hallowed vineyard that had fallen into disrepair makes him the next superstar. Think Thomas Pynchon with a little Umberto Eco thrown in. It’s a seductive brew of fact, legend, and gossip.

I started to dream that maybe I’d get to wander the countryside, inspecting old cellars and chatting with vignerons. I’d definitely get to taste a lot of wine. I’m so there. I think.

In San Francisco, there’s a beautiful and eclectic store that sells motorcycle jackets and cheese, among an array of other perfectly selected merchandise. But I just can’t get myself to buy dairy products from a clothing store. If I were really serious about opening a shop, and the idea was slowly dawning upon me, I’d have to make it special because of its approach, not because I also sold wheels of Brie and very attractive pots.

When the fish guy left in 2004, we renovated the second floor while we debated what to put on the first. The vision remained nebulous until one night in January 2005 at what seemed like an unremarkable press dinner promoting the new Conran store under the Fifty-ninth Street bridge, I was seated next to Julie Lasky,
then editor in chief of
I.D
. magazine. Smart, a good listener, and a heavy pourer, Julie coaxed me to confess my vague idea for a store downstairs from my new home. She then promptly exacted a promise from me to write a story for
I.D
. about its development. Nursing a walloping headache the next day, I cursed my lack of discretion and thought, “Now what?”

I thought of Charles and Ray Eames’s short film
Powers of Ten
, which starts on a picnic blanket and zooms in and out from that spot to provide startling perspectives on the everyday. I have spent much of my career at that picnic, designing napkins and dishes. Occasionally, with my work on interiors as well as a book, I’ve danced around a power of ten or two. But I’ve never really strayed far from the blanket.

Perhaps because I was also going to be a dad soon, I felt ready to leave my blankie behind. But instead of joining the rush to become a global name, I decided to zoom in. I had become more interested in connecting with the folks in my new neighborhood than in doing business with the shoppers at the mall.

I didn’t see this new possible venture as a stretch so much as a reaffirmation of what design is supposed to be all about: making daily life a little better and, if I was lucky, elevating the mundane into ritual. I also hoped that by seeing design from another power of ten, I might become a better designer.

Don’t think I was being humble. In the pantheon of cool jobs, furniture designer had replaced supermodel. But to me, being a shopkeeper with a corkscrew in my pocket, an apron around my waist, and a pencil behind my ear just seemed way cooler.

With an open bottle of Chianti in front of me, I started to imagine frequent scopa (an Italian card game similar to hearts)
and grappa-tasting nights. You play cards. You drink. Maybe you snack on a little salami and a hunk of cheese. Sure, I wanted to sell cases of La Tâche to Wall Street fat cats, but I also wanted my neighbors and family to have a good time. I wanted a place that sold dozens of choices of wines under $10. I wanted it to offer great guidance. I wanted it to have a secret back room. I wanted it to be really well designed, a place my customers would want to show their friends. But I didn’t want it Designed with gratuitous blobs, catchy themes, or ersatz wine cellars.

So there it was: I had a motive in an empty space and a career idling briskly in neutral. I had the interest and passion. And now I had a plan, which I’d announced to fifty thousand people in a magazine article that I wrote on a whim. I just needed that last push.

In the end, it wasn’t just romance that convinced me. The neighborhood was changing quickly. Directly behind us, the entire block was being beautifully renovated into high-end apartments. Studying the local demographics, I quickly found out that our South Street Seaport zip code was growing tremendously and now had the highest per capita income in New York City, higher than Tribeca or the Upper East Side.

Better yet, these new residents would be seeking out services, including liquor stores. There was no wine store within half a mile of us, and the closest one was more of a hip-flask-and-Thunderbird kind of place. The nearest decent retailer was a mile and a half away—in Manhattan! That’s quite a schlep if you’re lugging a few bottles of Côtes du Rhône.

And so Becky and I leaped.

WE HAD BEEN LOOKING
for a building to buy for four years. Like many New Yorkers, Becky and I were always window-shopping for the next great place to live. We loved pointing to some un-renovated garret and imagining “how amazing would it be to live there!” Most of the ogling was pure fantasy, but the game was fun.

My dream had been to fix up a diamond in the rough, rent out a few apartments, and keep one space for Becky and myself. We had come close on some potential projects: a parking garage in what is now the center of New York’s Chelsea art district, a Chinese social club on the Lower East Side facing Hamilton Fish Park. The one I kick myself about was a former male porno theater complete with turnstiles and facing the Hudson River—for $400,000. At the time, the waterfront location was forbidding and the place needed more cash for construction than I thought I could muster. The now seven-story building stands one block from the Richard Meier towers on Perry Street, where Martha Stewart’s daughter has a triplex.

Enough looking already, I thought. Commit!

When a friend told me about a building he had bought in the Seaport, I decided to check out the low-profile neighborhood, and I noticed a sign hanging in front of a waterfront shell of a building. I was in love.

When we first bought our building on South Street in 2002, it was still part of the Fulton Fish Market. Every night, several hundred guys in big rubber boots with ice hooks slung over their shoulders, with names like Beansie and Tony Ice, would arrive. We’d hear the sound of fish-laden skids scraping along the asphalt as the forklifts shoved the day’s cargo into place. Then the
floodlit streets would become packed with sparkling fish laid out in the middle of the road. In the winter, there were bonfires in garbage cans, leaving the air thick with the smell of the East River, wood smoke, and fish. From our ramshackle fifth-floor loft, we’d watch these scenes unfold, occasionally leaning out on the fire escape to get a better glimpse of a particularly large fish or a noisy dispute. Living there felt like being an extra in a movie about nineteenth-century New York.

We’d been able to afford the graffiti-streaked hulk less than a year after 9/11 because it was a few blocks from Ground Zero. “A whole building for the price of a two-bedroom apartment,” the broker gushed. The inspector we hired to survey it was a little less impressed. “Thank God you’re young,” he said. The in-laws from Pennsylvania asked, “You want our only daughter to live
here
?”

Our first step in 2003 was to buy out the top floor tenant, the web designer. With our now empty bank account, we renovated the space enough to make it habitable, removing the frosted glass that blocked the Brooklyn Bridge views and the two-story storage island that dominated the space.

Situated on one of the few remaining stretches of Manhattan’s commercial waterfront, the warehouse may have been decrepit, but it also had sixteen windows facing the Brooklyn Bridge. The previous owner, a retired fishmonger, was eager to get rid of the crumbling wreck. Under all the soot, we saw a potentially stunning Federal-style waterfront home with tenants to help defray its operating costs. At least that was the plan. Three years before we decided to open up the wineshop, the ground floor was stacked with salmon instead of Brunellos and Barbarescos. Every day, Crescent City Seafood, which occupied the space at
the time, used forklifts and wooden hand trucks to move in and out seventy thousand pounds of sashimi-grade sockeye. Crescent specialized in what the trade called “Jewish” fish (pike, whitefish, and salmon); the rest of my block between Peck Slip and Beekman Street was Italian. They sold just about everything else that swam, plus calamari. Perhaps that was why my fellow paisans seemed to welcome me so warmly.

Carmine, one of my favorite fishmongers, operated a few doors down. He liked to greet me in his cardigan and glasses, holding both of my hands in his and telling me that just seeing me made his day. “You’re doin’ good, kid.” Carmine seemed to be just as charitable to everyone else except to someone he referred to as “that fuck Giuliani.” In the 1980s, Carmine had additional business interests in the form of an informal parking concession that he “owned” under the FDR, the elevated highway that runs along the river on the east side of Manhattan. According to Carmine, Giuliani, then the district attorney and keen on making more of a name for himself, came to the Fulton Street Market one day to announce his intention to clean up the joint. When his visit was met with a squid tossed in his direction by what Carmine termed some “punk,” Giuliani responded with a witch hunt, asking the fish guys to rat out the kid who did it. After they refused (“We take care of our own,” Carmine reminded me), “the market,” he said, “was wrecked. And just over a scungil.”

Still, I could never quite think of this kind old man as a gangster, even if he would never speak to me on the phone—Carmine preferred to walk and talk—and was driven around in a Buick by a thuggy-looking kid. My wife was a little more suspicious when Carmine suggested that we open a Laundromat in his building
after the market moved. “Launder?” Becky squealed. “Carmine’s not interested in dry cleaning; he’s talking code!” But I still can hear him: “Four bucks to iron a pair of pants? Now that’s a racket!”

No one on the block has been better friends to me than the Fogliano brothers, who operated Fair Fish in the adjacent eighteenth-century buildings. Vinnie and Frank saw me bring my newborn son home from the hospital, and they always made sure we had seven fishes on Christmas Eve (even if we only had six people for dinner). Rugged in his denim shirt and mustache, Vinnie was the front man. Frank, whose soft hands stood in stark contrast to the cracked and weathered mitts of his fellow fishmongers, dressed nattily in calfskin jackets; he preferred the relative quiet of his second-floor office.

On raw January mornings, when I walked our dog, Guendalina, I’d see Vinnie surrounded by crates of fish, piles of slush, and dozens of helpers hefting carcasses with gaffing hooks, with his arms crossed, standing in front of his building calmly surveying the market chaos.

The Foglianos, like many vineyard owners, are consumed by what they do. What does a great producer do on his off time? Eat and drink wine. What does Vinnie do? Go fishing. As anyone who has ever seen
Deadliest Catch
or
Sideways
knows, there are many easier ways to make money. They forge on, but fundamentally, both winemaker and fishmonger operate at the whim of nature. Good crop/good catch and they are happy. Bad crop/bad catch and they both seem to get superstitious. At least from the viewpoint of this city boy, the noble farmer surveying his vines and the gritty seaman scanning the horizon at sunrise (albeit under the shadow of the FDR Drive overpass) are equally
romantic. The fish may now arrive in aircraft containers and the winery may look like an operating theater, but fishmonger and winemaker are still Old World. This may explain at least a little about how natural the transition from fish storage to wine store seemed to me, despite how it flummoxed my friends.

Harder to relate to were the equally crusty older artists and wannabes who settled in the area during the 1970s. Many of them took pride, like my former residential tenants who lived above the fish market, in having homesteaded in a scruffy neighborhood. “Heat, who cared about heat?” the web designer cum video maker who lived on the fifth floor told me. “We didn’t even have stairs.” A few were also bitter that somehow they’d not been plucked from that salty goop and sent on to painting superstardom.

What both subcultures shared was fierce loyalty to an area that, as far as both groups were concerned, no one else really knew about. To an extent, they were right. The Seaport Historic District, despite being three blocks from Wall Street, directly across the island from the World Trade Center, and a block and a half north of the Seaport Mall, was sub rosa. So central yet so small, it’s easily overlooked. Among the ten million people who flock to the Seaport each year, just a few hundred, most of them Europeans, take the time to investigate the neighborhood. To New Yorkers, and I was among them, the sixteen-square-block grid south of the Brooklyn Bridge is practically invisible. Before we bought our building, I had last visited the Seaport area on a fourth-grade field trip to see the tall ships.