Uncorked (3 page)

No one I met in this neighborhood—other than Carmine, who liked to wash down his calamari with a glass of Frascati—seemed
to care about wine. Consequently, it’s unlikely I would have even entered the wine business if not for the untimely demise of our tenant, Crescent Fish, who never made it to that new market in the Bronx. In the insular world of fish, their downfall was variously attributed to (1) gambling, (2) alcohol [not wine, I suspect], (3) a Mexican snapper farm that went belly up. I suspect all three.

But the clearest evidence of something not quite kosher among the whitefish specialists was their office on the second floor of our building. The front space was unremarkable in its cruddiness. Behind the barred windows and beneath the buzz of the fluorescent tubes ruled the big-haired office manager (imagine
Working Girl
plus twenty years, minus the Melanie Griffith looks), whose main job seemed to be strewing handwritten fish orders over the peeling, vinyl-tiled floor.

Wander into the back room that my wife and I called the clubhouse and the mayhem was more obvious. The central feature was a scarred wood table littered with change and stabbed in the middle by a large knife. Adorning the walls were
Playboy
pinups studded with question-mark-shaped ice hooks impaled into the drywall. Among the weapons, the money, and the dice, I’m not sure exactly what they did up there, but I’m pretty certain they weren’t playing bridge and drinking tea. On the windows, there was chicken wire in lieu of glass, and the bathroom, whose drain had been disconnected some years earlier, was in continuous use. There were piles of rubber boots caked in fish scales. To the side, there was also a door to a locked room that no one would enter and to which I was never given the keys.

The whole
Gangs of New York
scene was presided over by a
menacing guy with a buff body, bulging eyes, an explosive temper, and an ever-present gaffing hook slung over his shoulder. Some mornings, we could even hear his screaming four stories above the din of dozens of forklifts and delivery trucks. Once, the day after one of those fits, I noticed that one of his loaders had a black eye. Then they were gone. No big-haired office manager. No muscle-bound enforcer. No stacks of swordfish. Not even a scale. The space was empty. For a minute we panicked, but then we quickly adjusted to the absence of all that hubbub and the attendant fish odors. Now we just had to figure out how to fill the void.

When we first bought the five-story building, we had four tenants: the fish guys on the bottom two floors and three rent-stabilized tenants on the floors above. In New York City, rent-stabilized apartments are protected from sharp increases in rent, and tenants have the right to renew their leases indefinitely. If the graffiti, fish guts, and crumbling masonry were not enough to dissuade potential buyers, the prospect of permanent tenants locked into below-market rents would have turned off most rational buyers.

I HAD NO INTENTION
of opening a wineshop. I dreamed of Sloppy Louie, proprietor of the eponymous fish restaurant immortalized by
New Yorker
writer Joseph Mitchell in
Up in the Old Hotel
. Louie, whose real name was Louis Morino, was a fisherman from Genoa who prepared fish so simply and so well that the fishmongers would bring him their catch to cook. Louie’s had long tables and tin ceilings and was located smack in the
center of New York’s mercantile center (and a block from my building). Mitchell describes it as the kind of place where you might find a Schermerhorn (a family that first arrived in the city when it was called Nieuw Amsterdam) sitting next to a fisherman down the counter from a mobster. What they all craved was fresh fish done right, along with a heavy dose of authentic seaside ambience. Louie was, Mitchell explains, a crusty but consummate host, kind of the Sirio Maccioni of his day, albeit down-market and fifty years earlier.

During the 1930s, Louie’s restaurant opened at five o’clock in the morning. Breakfasts, according to Mitchell, included kippered herring and scrambled eggs, shad roe omelets, and split sea scallops and bacon. Variety was also one of Louie’s trademarks. Mitchell describes one day’s menu as offering “cod cheeks, salmon cheeks, cod tongues, sturgeon liver, blue-shark steak, tuna steak, squid stew, and five kinds of roe—shad roe, cod roe, mackerel roe, herring roe, and yellow pike roe.” And that was in addition to the standard seafood staples.

Having designed restaurants for some very savvy clients, I knew enough to not run one myself. But I imagined Mario Batali would make the perfect proprietor of an updated version of this classic Italian fish place. So I worked my connections, polished my pitch—and never made it past his assistant. Undeterred, I next approached Mary Redding, the owner of the West Village icon Mary’s Fish Camp. Mary, along with her ex, Rebecca Charles, seemed to have single-handedly invented the haute lobster roll. With such a deft touch with local seafood, I thought Mary would be a natural. “Already committed to something else” read her seemingly truthful handwritten brush-off.

So I put that fish restaurant idea on the back burner and listed the ground floor space with a broker. The market, I thought, would let me know what should be there. And it did. “Awesome,” said the club entrepreneur upon opening the rear freezer early one morning as I tried to ignore his alcohol breath. Over the gurgle of his motorcycle, which he left idling on my sidewalk, an inner voice whispered, “Run!”

There were some attractive offers (the Bao Noodles outpost, the man from Piedmont who ended up opening a place around the corner), but the more these guys trudged through the coolers, the more uncomfortable I felt. Were they really going to make the space look good? Was it going to be too loud for us to live upstairs? In a city where the average restaurant lasts eighteen months, would they last? Or would their true legacy be a permanent rodent problem? And, perhaps surprising for someone who had lived over a fish vendor, what about the kitchen smells?

Meanwhile, Becky and I worried about the mortgage and carped about all the services missing in our transitional neighborhood. As excited as we both were about being nestled in the heart of the oldest part of New York City, with jaw-dropping views of the Brooklyn Bridge, we had no dry cleaner and couldn’t find a good supermarket. We couldn’t even find a decent bottle of wine!

And then (cue music) it clicked. Wineshops are clean, quiet, and genteel. You don’t hear about liquor stores going out of business. And we both love wine.

Researching the history of our building, I also found that this wasn’t the first time wine was sold on the premises. The structure,
built in 1839, originally had been a pair of Federal-style row houses commissioned by the boat outfitters Slate, Gardiner and Howell, which supplied ships moored at the piers across the street. In 1882, the enterprising Jim Flynn joined the two buildings and converted them into a tavern under a rooming house (read: brothel). It was another fifty years before the girls were replaced with fish.

I turned to one of the most venerated names in wine selling in the metropolitan area and the only retailer in New York State that seemed to have figured out how to work around local liquor laws that prohibit the same owner from operating at more than one location: Morrell & Company.

Morrell’s, started during the 1920s by two resourceful brothers, Samuel and Joseph, initially sold Virginian wine of questionable quality. Then, during Prohibition, they turned to supplying churches and other houses of worship with sacramental wines, as well as physicians, who could prescribe alcoholic beverages for medicinal purposes. One of Morrell’s most popular offerings was a wine “tonic” called Virginia Dare that was made from the scuppernong grape, a little-known varietal grown extensively in that state since the Colonial era.

In the 1950s, Sam’s daughter, Charlotte, made the store more up-market and frequently made trips to France to buy Bordeaux and Burgundy. Business flourished, and Morrell soon established itself as one of the country’s premier sources of those coveted producers. In 1994, Morrell’s became the first New York retailer to get into the lucrative and prestigious auction business.

Now run by Peter, Charlotte’s son and a legendary New York wine figure, and his sister, Roberta, Morrell’s is one of America’s
best-known names in wine. Along with Sherry-Lehmann and Acker Merrall & Condit, Morrell’s is considered part of the trinity of New York’s carriage-trade vintners.

Morrell’s has an impressive store in Rockefeller Center. Next door, they recently put in a bustling wine bar, and they’ve opened locations on the Upper East Side and in East Hampton.

The man behind this expansion was Nikos Antonakeas, the dashing Greek husband of Peter’s sister, Roberta. We met, we talked, and we drank. But we never really got past the dating stage. Nikos was intrigued but concerned about the lack of foot traffic. After digging a little deeper, I too became uneasy.

Nikos, I discovered, met the thirty-years-his-senior Roberta (age seventy-six) through her son, Jon, who in turn had met him on a street corner in Athens. While on vacation, Jon was looking for an antique necklace for his mother, and Nikos helped him find one. A year later, Nikos came to New York and looked up the name on the business card Jon had handed him. The two young men and Jon’s mother had lunch together. Roberta offered the handsome Nikos a job on the spot. A year later, they married. But their partnership didn’t seem built only on a mutual love of wine. Nikos was passionate, but according to one of his East Hampton colleagues, he also had a fiery temper. “Just make sure you get everything written down,” he explained. More unsettling than Nikos’s outbursts was the fact that the Morrell’s flagship store, I later found out, was suffering. Staff turnover was high. The rent was staggering, and their prices were even more out of reach, a good 15 percent more than those of their competitors.

I then turned to a more trusted source, a firm older than even the incorporation of Manhattan. Berry Bros. & Rudd, founded in 1698 by the Widow Bourne, is London’s oldest and most
venerable wine and spirits purveyor. It still occupies the same Tudor building at 3 St. James’s Street, has two Royal Warrants (this identifies them as officially recognized suppliers to the royal family), and a two-and-a-half-million-bottle inventory, including some of the world’s most coveted wines in the rarest vintages.

Inside this extraordinary wineshop, with an incongruous coffee mill sign hanging out front, there are rich oak-paneled walls, burnished oval tables, elegant Windsor chairs, richly carved fireplaces topped with ornate heraldry. There’s no wine on the shelves or anywhere in sight. Bottles traditionally were stored in the cellars, which stretch from St. James’s Street to Pall Mall. It took Berrys’ 303 years after the original store opened to offer self-service.

But under all those groined vaults, this august London store has long been startlingly innovative. Berrys’ started as a coffee shop (hence the sign) whose marketing genius was to weigh customers—William Pitt, Beau Brummell, Lord Byron, and the Aga Khan among them—on an enormous coffee scale, a novelty in the days before mass production.

In the 1830s, as tea and coffee started to wane in popularity among London’s elite, Berrys’ briefly turned to beer, becoming the agent for Bass and Co.’s East India Pale Ale. Then, as antialcohol (and particularly anti-gin) sentiment grew, they moved to clarets, ports, and sherries, which, as the domain of the British elite, were left alone.

In 1903, during King Edward VII’s reign, the royal doctor approached the Berrys for something to ward off the chill felt by His Majesty when in his “horseless carriage.” Henry Berry sent over the firm’s brandy and ginger cordial, originally known as “Ginger Brandy—Special Liqueur.” More than a hundred
years later, “The King’s Ginger Liqueur,” as it was subsequently renamed, continues to be a bestseller.