Uncorked by Marco Pasanella Read Free Book Online Page A

The minor payola, the attorney general contended, included gifts such as iPods and vacation trips. The big numbers were funneled in more creative ways. Large retailers, I later learned, had set up shell marketing companies to receive payments for ads in their mail-order catalogs. If you saw a full-page spread for a name brand in a store circular, chances were that it was a paid advertisement. Spitzer also alleged that some wholesalers bought gift cards from those customers ($400,000 worth in one case).
    Although the investigation was good news for small retailers like me, secretly, I was less than horrified by what it had revealed. Practices Spitzer described as dastardly (“Kickbacks!” “Payola!”) sounded pretty mundane when I thought of them as discounts and perks to preferred customers. Not surprisingly, the big guy was getting the best price. As the
New York Sun
argued in a November 14, 2005, editorial, these deals may be unsavory, might even be illegal, but certainly were not as criminal as, say, Medicaid fraud.
    That fall, while Spitzer was rounding up bad guys and we were waiting anxiously for the license, we started drinking with purpose. We may not yet have had the official go-ahead, but we had a store to fill and had to figure out what to sell.
    It soon became clear that Janet, the daughter of a religiousstudies professor and a pious mother, bowed to one God: French Burgundy. One of the first times we tasted with her was on the second floor amid the stacks of computer boxes, the unopened cash register tapes, and the scattered wine cases. On top of her paper-strewn desk, she uncorked a 1999 Armand Rousseau Gevrey-Chambertin, an excellent year for a signature wine of an esteemed winemaker. And if what followed was not exactly seeing the eye of God, it was an epiphany.
    Janet poured and swirled.
    And lingered.
    She closed her eyes.
    She coddled the glass.
    She inhaled and sighed a half dozen times.
    Becky and I looked at each other dumbfounded. “
This
is who you hired?” I could hear my wife silently asking.
    But the smell—no, the aroma—was captivating. Woodsy, mushroomy, and wet, it reminded me of walking through the chestnut forests behind our house in Italy. More oohs and aahs followed after her first sips. We dived in. I was really concentrating. It was complicated. The taste was feral but refined. For the first time, I was listening to a wine. And all of a sudden it occurred to me: this is sexy. Becky was smiling too.
    For someone used to washing down
tordelli
(a Tuscan meat-filled ravioli) with a back-slapping Chianti, the first real tasting was a lot like discovering another virtual room. I had been drinking wine all my life but had never really tasted it until this point.
    There’s an industry saying that it takes eight years for a wine drinker to mature from predominantly cheap and simple Australian Shiraz to almost exclusively expensive and nuanced FrenchBurgundy. In the five years that have passed, I have discovered many wines that I like as much as, but none more than, a fine Burgundy.
    Over time, our tastings became more frequent, and occasionally as compelling, but one thing was soon clear: Becky has a much better nose than I do. She could down ten Pinot Grigios and pick the best almost without thinking. Even though I had grown up in a wine culture, had read all those wine books (Hugh Johnson’s encyclopedic
Atlas of Wine
, the equally exhaustive
The Oxford Companion to Wine
, Clive Coates’s
Wines of Burgundy
, and all the Robert Parker books among them), and wanted to be good, I still lagged behind her. I could pick the coolest or the most revered wine, but I could not tell you the best. My palate was color-blind: I could make out the outlines, but I was missing the substance.
    It didn’t help that Janet was soon taking me to dinners among the wine-obsessed, where she inevitably would show off. One of her favorite parlor tricks was to blind taste a bottle in front of a group of wine