Uncorked (4 page)

Their biggest breakthrough, however, was in 1923. Francis Berry created a light-colored whiskey blend that contrasted sharply with the dark, oily Scotches fashionable at the time. That delicate blend, named Cutty Sark after the famed clipper whose Scottish name was taken from a Robert Burns poem, “Tam O’Shanter,” took off. By the 1960s, Cutty Sark, the “abbreviated chemise of a winsome wench” in Gaelic, dominated the US market. It’s now sold in more than a hundred countries, and those mammoth sales have provided much of the capital for innovative expansion.

Berry Bros. & Rudd, among the first to recognize the importance of e-commerce, launched its website in 1994, a year before Amazon. In the intervening years, Berry also launched two wine schools as well as shops in Dublin, Hong Kong, and Japan.

Wouldn’t Berry Bros. & Rudd be interested in opening up three blocks from Wall Street? Think of the splash they could make: the oldest London shop now in the oldest New York neighborhood at the epicenter of commerce. Wouldn’t the historically entrepreneurial retailer want to seize a humongous new opportunity? Wouldn’t the preeminent seller of high-end French wines want to be close to all those bulging pockets and hungry egos?

Nope. Or, as I recall, a more particularly British rebuff, the obsequious fuck off: “So kind of you to offer. So sorry we are not in position to act on this wonderful opportunity. Do let us know when you open. Best of luck.”

Nothing like a little rejection to galvanize me. With Berrys’ out of the picture, I knew two things: a wineshop would be ideal
in that space, but finding the right one might take forever. And wasn’t I the wine lover with the vision? The guy who was ready to take on a new challenge? Did it really matter that I didn’t know anything about running a retail store? That I didn’t have a clue about the wine business?

Well, yes, it did. But I was committed. And the adventure already had started.

chapter 2

W
ITH THE DREAM CRYSTALLIZED
(and Becky pregnant), it was time, in early 2005, to focus on the pragmatic—as in how in the hell we were going to pay for this reverie. I did what every other red-blooded American appeared to be doing at the time: I doubled our mortgage. Actually, I increased it two and a half-fold. I tried not to dwell on why the only financial institution willing to finance our dream was an offshore bank on the fifth floor of a nondescript downtown office building. We were in deep, but we felt flush.

And flush was exactly what we needed. After its hasty departure the previous year, our fish tenant had left us a smelly box with concrete floors punctured by floor drains clogged with fish scales. There was no heat. There weren’t even doors and windows behind the rusty roll-down gates. During these early days, I spent a lot of time wandering around the various crannies muttering, “Shit,” as I discovered one wrinkle after another: the compressor is leaking Freon. “Shit.” The electrical cords are mounted with duct tape. “Shit.” The peeling paint looks old enough to contain lead. “Shit, shit!”

Once the space was cleared, the real challenge became clear: What was this store going to look like? Most wineshops are organized geographically (e.g., Italian in aisle 1 and French in aisle 2). Fancy liquor and hip flasks, the items most likely to be shoplifted, are displayed behind the counter. As in grocery stores, the layout tends to be “racetrack”: The customer is led in a large oval, or “power aisle,” that features a main thoroughfare sprouting minor branches. Aisles typically are separated with gondolas,
the ubiquitous double-sided display racks best suited for showing off boxes of Lucky Charms. Shelf talkers, invariably rave descriptions of every choice, are tacked below the bottles. Bigger stores often use the preprinted ones from their wine distributors. Stacked on the floor near the entry is the inventory you hope to move. Either it has the best markup (wineshops make more on the cheap stuff) or it is the junk you were forced into buying to get something of higher quality that you wanted.

In Europe, a hands-off approach still dominates. Stores typically display one bottle of each selection, often behind closed cabinet doors. You must ask for help if you actually want to hold a bottle. New York’s Sherry-Lehmann recently renovated its flagship, using a similar model. Display bottles are under lock and key, and stock is sent up from the basement by notifying a clerk. Buying wine feels luxurious—and intimidating. Neither of these directions was particularly compelling to us.

My brother Nicolas was also one of those naysayers. “Who’s really going to buy wine down in that godforsaken neighborhood?” my skeptical sibling asked me. “Malt liquor, maybe,” he offered, “but
wine
?”

Nicky’s doubts juiced my enthusiasm. Despite being whip-smart (he’s an architect and successful real estate developer), my brother is staggeringly trend-deaf. When Starbucks was opening its first New York store, I remember his dismissal: “Cappuccino?” he scoffed, “Who’s going to pay four bucks for a cup of coffee?”

Nicky’s predictions are so consistently the opposite of the truth that an actor I know often asks him about her movies as a way to gauge their box office appeal. “
Silence of the What
?” I can still hear him ask incredulously.

Ten or so years ago, Best Cellars, a small store on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, revolutionized wine sales by grouping wines according to taste (“Fresh,” “Juicy,” “Big,” “Sweet,” etc.) rather than by country or grape varietal. Cofounder Joshua Wesson realized that for everyday wine, people were more concerned with what a wine tastes like rather than from which incomprehensible appellation it hails. A radical approach, the strategy was so successful that Best Cellars was bought by the A&P supermarket chain in 2007. The only downside of this super user-friendliness is that it tends to limit the customer it initially seduces. At a certain point, some shoppers—the majority of our customers, we thought—would want to go deeper than “Sweet.” If we were going to try to make a unique and better wineshop, we would have to take a more sophisticated tack.

Our first stab was a shop as a wine library. We lined the room’s perimeter with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and rolling ladders. We laid out the floor in rows of waist-high bookshelves. We envisioned the doors with copper mesh panels and the woodwork painted glossy gray-green. “Like that store in which Catherine Deneuve worked in the
Umbrellas of Cherbourg
,” Becky had remarked. It was all very efficient, very pretty, and, aside from the fancy paint, much like any other liquor store you have ever visited. Walking in, you would have been confronted by thousands of bottles vying for your attention—exactly the intimidating overload we wanted to avoid.

In our next iteration, Becky and I took the opposite approach. Instead of wall-to-wall wine, we decided to highlight a few curated bottles and then create contexts for them to help our customers understand and feel confident about their choices.
We envisioned miniature still lifes in which the bottles would be accompanied by pictures of the winemakers, a review or two pinned up on corkboards, and perhaps even bowls of the grapes from which those particular wines were made. We were valiantly trying to make the point that wine is handmade by real people who have a strong connection to their product. Upon further inspection, we discovered that this precious system would allow us to display a total of eleven bottles at a time. Besides, where in hell were we going to get bunches of Verdicchio grapes in the middle of winter?

I didn’t want the store to feel like a museum lesson or an elegant warehouse. I wanted it to evoke the part of my life that I remember from my summers at Villa Cannizzaro, our family’s seventeenth-century stone house in Camaiore, a small town outside of Lucca in Tuscany.

For more than thirty years, daily life there had been presided over by my father, Giovanni, a painter turned architect turned painter, and Lisetta, my father’s companion. Actually, for most of those years, Lisetta was in charge. Both patrician and energetic, Lisetta is a woman of great culture but blunt. She either loved you—or not.

They met in the early 1970s when my father was recovering from a heart attack at the hospital in nearby Pietrasanta. Lisetta had also suffered one some months earlier, and they were immediately drawn to each other. I guess you could say that their love grew out of two broken hearts.

Lisetta is a natural cook with an encyclopedic knowledge of local dishes. Although we had help, she was often in the kitchen skinning a rabbit that someone had been too slow to prepare
or speeding up the pasta prep by churning out a few hundred feather-light gnocchi. One of her biggest fans, my dad was always a
buona forchetta
—a “good fork,” or enthusiastic eater.

Lisetta always has the inside scoop, whether sweaters knit by Missoni’s sample maker or shoes cobbled at Ferragamo’s factory or linen shirts with mother-of-pearl buttons sewn by a sweet signora down the road. Lisetta knows where to source the best pottery in Montelupo, the finest glass in Empoli, the prettiest marble in Vallecchia. She can point you to the best nursery to buy a bougainvillea and the best price on terra-cotta roof tiles. She knows the nondescript storefront behind which to find lambskin suede jackets and the similarly hidden attic from which to source Nepalese cashmere spun in Como. When she is food shopping, local merchants always treat her entrance with a combination of deference and enthusiasm. “Oh, signora!” they say, and then disappear into back rooms to fetch her the freshest Pecorino and the tastiest sausages.

To Lisetta, paying $150 for a bottle of Ornellaia, the famed super-Tuscan red wine, would be equal parts stupidity and bad taste.

Instead, we used to buy our wine in bulk from various family friends. One of our favorites was a Rosso di Montalcino from Cortona. During those summers in the 1970s and 1980s, two things were most memorable: the wine tasted good, even to a disinterested kid/teenager/young adult, and the
damigiana
, equivalent to seventy bottles of wine, was a pain in the butt to heft out of our Fiat. The decanting process was also a messy family project. To keep the wine from spoiling, we bottled it ourselves with supplies from the local
agrario
(farm supply store). Usually, my father would spill and imbibe a fair amount of wine trying to prime the siphon, and we would giggle and everyone left the cellar smiling in wine-splotched clothes. Instead of corks, we sealed each bottle with a tablespoon of our olive oil. (Like corks, olive oil keeps the oxygen from entering the bottle.) Oenophiles will gasp, but because of the oil, we always stored the bottles standing up in the cantina. When we were ready to drink, we used another specialized siphon, a glass bottle with two protruding glass straws, to suck off the oil while leaving the wine undisturbed.