Il Buco wine cellar

II

IL VINO

The first time Alberto and I descended the steep flight of stairs into the basement of 47 Bond, it was as if we’d walked straight into a secret. Rooms like this just didn’t exist in New York, not even in the nineties. Long and high-ceilinged with thick stone walls that kept the temperature cool, old vaulted coal furnaces along one wall. The cavernous space was filled with canvases, tubes of oil paint, wooden easels, the equipment of a working painter.

Patricia, one of the three artists who shared the storefront, used it as her studio. Works in progress—large, circular paintings inspired by crop circles—were scattered about. She had built a wall across the belly of the room, but even that couldn’t banish the genius loci. The stone walls seemed older than Manhattan; even the floor seemed primordial. It felt like an ancient crypt or a sacristy kept from the public’s view. Alberto and I were already in love with the building, but this sealed the deal. We thought, at the same time and immediately, that the space would make an amazing wine cellar one day. Wine needs to be kept cool, quiet, and unperturbed. It didn’t get more unperturbed than this. Nearly two hundred years ago, Edgar Allan Poe had supposedly passed many a night around here. In the mid-1800s Bond Street was part of a notorious red-light district filled with prostitution and opium dens. It was reputed Poe drowned the sorrows of his wife’s illness in the cellar there, likely with absinthe and perhaps with an occasional opium hit, shared with a “lady friend” who lived in the building. It must have been cozy. Judging from the old masonry line, the ceiling in those days was a good four feet lower than it is today. Rumor has it that it was in this basement that Poe conceived his short tale of revenge, “The Cask of Amontillado,” about a man burying his nemesis in the walls of a wine cellar. In fact, in the mid-1940s, New York University sent in an excavation crew to dig in the caves to determine if there were in fact any remains. Nothing was discovered.

Initially, the cellar served as a storage space for our new antiques store, so we left it mostly as is. But from the moment we got our wine and beer license, dated July 18, 1994 (Alberto’s fortieth birthday), we began plotting to create that wine cellar. Alberto and I gathered a handful of distributors, determined to make a small boutique list in our little wine/tapas bar. We would serve a small menu of inspired tapas accompanied by a wine list of little-known producers respecting terroir. We were guided by the predilections of Alberto, though we eventually brought in the expertise of our dear client, Jonathan Nossiter, a kindred spirit in zest for life and purist approach to all things wine. Additionally, we shared a love of film. I’ll never forget the first day we met to discuss our collaboration. Jonathan invited us to his little apartment in Nolita. He served a delicious pasta lunch with a bottle of Marqués de Murietta Rioja Blanco. This golden-yellow, slightly oxidized wine with nutty tones and rich acidity initiated our collaboration.

Under Jonathan’s guidance, Alberto and I began to fill the room with bottles of the Spanish, Italian, and American wines Alberto loved so much. There was an unusual selection of Mediterranean wines, including old-style Riojas, like Rioja Alta, Muga, and Lopéz de Heredia, and the iconic Château Musar of Lebanon. But our list also included manzanillas, olorosos, and amontillados from Andalucía and an ample number of Madeiras and ports. We went to work to turn the space into a proper cellar. Borrowing a system we saw in a wine bar in Spain, and with the help of our old friend Jimmy Galuppo of Etna Tool & Die across Bond Street, we installed iron castings along the ceiling, in which the bottles could rest and made iron gates to close the wine inside the three old coal beds along the back right wall of the space. From Warren Muller, one of the original artists in the space, we bought one of his curlicue chandeliers, which filled the cellar walls with a lovely romantic light, and schlepped a table we had found in Pennsylvania down the steep flight. Because we didn’t have a Certificate of Occupancy, we couldn’t technically host anyone down there, but occasionally our regulars would surreptitiously find their way downstairs to smoke cigarettes and drink glasses of rare auction wines well into the night.

At the end of the day, however, we were a small tapas bar, mostly an antique store, with an idiosyncratic wine program with modest ambition. Jonathan’s life turned to film, beginning with Sunday and then to the documentary Mondovino and books such as Liquid Memory: Why Wine Matters. His travels took him farther and farther away, but the friendship has lasted these twenty-five years. How did we go from then to now, when the cellar is overflowing with some of the world’s best wines and our list hovers around eight hundred offerings? Simple: a man named Roberto Paris.

I’ll never forget the day in 1997 when a tall Italian man with scraggly dreadlock-like hair approached me outside on the terrace. Our first review in New York magazine had recently come out. He asked me if he could speak with the owner. “You are,” I replied, “I’m the owner.”

“Isn’t there also an Italian owner?” he inquired.

“Yes,” I said, “that’s my partner, Alberto. I’ll run upstairs and get him.”

The surprise on Alberto’s face when he stepped onto the patio was epic. He and Roberto had grown up together in Foligno. As mentioned before, Alberto had had a rift with his family, and no one knew where he had landed. Roberto had been living with his brother in Westchester and came across the article. That first reunion lasted many hours but is now nearly twenty-three years strong. Alberto insisted that Roberto drop his day job and come and work with us at il Buco. He was persuasive. A few months later Roberto started, and he never left. Over the years he had many roles and wore many hats in the restaurant, but his most important—aside from always being my right hand, best friend, and the godfather of my son, Joaquin—was being an extraordinary wine director and spirit guide of the restaurant.

Roberto Paris, wine director

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Arnaldo Caprai vineyards, Montefalco, Italy; Roberto and Donna, Arnaldo Caprai Vineyards; Alberto, Donna, Salvatore, Roberto, Antonello, Neri, Clelia; Alberto and Salvatore Denaro; Roberto and Marco Caprai; wine barrels, Cantina Arnaldo Caprai

When Roberto Paris was a boy growing up in a small village across the valley from Foligno called Colle San Lorenzo in the 1950s, he knew he didn’t fit into the world into which he was born. His father, Edmondo, was a poor mason and a farmer who had spent World War II as an English prisoner of war held in Tasmania. (His mother, Luisa, meanwhile endured the ravages of wartime alone, raising Roberto’s older siblings.) Had the war not taken him around the world, Edmondo never would have left. Luisa never did. For the inhabitants of San Lorenzo, the scope of their lives was the scope of their eyes, rolling hills, olive groves, crumbling walls. Even in the 1950s, electricity was intermittent. Many houses had no running water. There was one television, which the village priest owned. For the first decade of his life, Roberto never left the town either.

With a much older brother and sister, and busy parents, Roberto was often left to his own devices. But he was an insatiable reader, mostly self-taught, and an inveterate dreamer. He devoured any book he could get his hands on. As the only bibliophile in his family, this chubby little boy with Pontormo eyes was a mystery to those closest to him. And as the world opened up to him from his small room in the volumes he read, he came to realize how different he was from the rest of the people in his village. It wasn’t until he read Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Ugly Duckling” that he truly found himself. Or rather, he found that he could be himself, regardless of where he was from or where an accident of fate had deposited him.

When Roberto was ten or eleven, the local priest approached Roberto’s parents and told them that their son, who had so lovely a voice he was picked to sing the Ave Maria at the local church, had a calling to join the priesthood. They agreed—his mother more than his father, an old Fascist who distrusted the church—and, from this little town, Roberto would travel across the valley to Foligno to attend a seminary school for young boys. The most salient detail here isn’t that, as the prelate soon discovered, he was an incorrigible troublemaker, or that, in fact, he didn’t believe in God—though he loved the solemn ceremony of Mass—but that the church had a library filled with both secular and religious texts. The calling that Roberto soon discovered that he had wasn’t toward the divine, but toward adventure. Filling hours reading James Fenimore Cooper, Jules Verne, the Italian swash-buckling novelist Emilio Salgari, and a massive multi-volume encyclopedia called I Treccani that contained, he thought at the time, the knowledge of the world, Roberto knew he had to explore the world, he had to get out of Foligno. And get out he did.

By the time he walked into Bond Street, Roberto was forty-two years old. He had lived an entire life. He had been a student in Rome and spent years traveling the world, through Italy, France, Germany, India, before returning to Foligno. There he opened an iconic enoteca, il Bacco Felice, with his friend Salvatore Denaro, with whom he shared a love of wine and life. In 1994 he secured a visa that landed him in the United States just as we were opening il Buco. Most recently he had been in San Francisco, he told us, installing spotlights in galleries and museums, mostly because it afforded him the chance to be alone with art.

Once Roberto joined the il Buco family, he and Alberto began their most personal quest, to bring Sagrantino, the sacred wine of Umbria, to New York. For Alberto and Roberto, the Sagrantino grape is part of their proud wine patrimony. Originally brought to the region by monks for making sacramental wine, the thick-skinned grape flourished in the long hot summers of the region. It became intimately tied with the land and Perugians. According to legend, falconers from nearby Montefalco would use a few drops to salve the wounds inflicted by the sharp talons of their charges. (A few glasses, I’m sure, further dulled the pain.) High in tannins and yet still quite elegant, Sagrantino has always had the potential to make great wine. But for years, decades, centuries, Sagrantino had been overlooked as a serious grape. It was thought suitable only for passito, or sweet, wines, or used as a wingman in Sangiovese blends. Even in Montefalco itself, the region in which Foligno and Colle San Lorenzo both sit, the grape’s potential had never been realized.

Post luncheon wineglasses, Alain Passard’s farm

However, in the 1971, a man named Arnaldo Caprai, a textile entrepreneur turned winemaker, bought twelve and a half acres of land in Montefalco with the idea of rescuing Sagrantino from the hinterlands of wine. For fifteen years, Arnaldo experimented with the Sagrantino, but it wasn’t until his son, Marco, took over in 1988 that the development of Sagrantino began in earnest. Together with the University of Milan, Marco began to selectively breed the rootstock, quadrant by quadrant, selecting clones that distilled and showcased the natural qualities of the grape. For the first time, Sagrantino was being treated with the respect it deserved. The wines rewarded the care. With Marco’s monomaniacal attention, the wines rose to the level of DOCG, the highest of Italy’s denominations. Now, by law, Sagrantino must be aged thirty-seven months, with twelve of those months in new oak barrels.

In New York, even in 1996, Sagrantino was still an unheard-of varietal, difficult to find and known only to people—like Alberto and Roberto—who carried a bit of Montefalco with them. Alberto had been trying to find it since day one with no luck, and I know that it galled him to have his grape unavailable. Our first experience of the grape was in unmarked bottles of wine Alberto would bring back in his suitcase, like contraband, made by the locals in Montefalco. It was the housemade wine his father drank for years. It was full bodied, full fruit, and luscious with the strong tannic undertone; I fell in love with it too. I relished its arrival but kept our few precious bottles for personal use.

For Roberto, who had grown up reading the work of the Italian anarchist Luigi Veronelli, a man who relentlessly fought for local-ness, the valorization of Sagrantino went beyond pride, beyond wine, and took on a moral component. He immediately understood what Alberto wanted and, with a twinkle in his eye, said, “Let me see what I can do.”

The next day, he showed up at il Buco with two cases of Sagrantino. The producer was an elderly gentleman named Paolo Bea, at that time making wines next to the barnyard where he kept his livestock. This was the only Sagrantino in New York, brought by a prescient boutique importer named Neal Rosenthal. In that act of procurement, Roberto had demonstrated that he understood what we were about at il Buco and had the chops to play along. In the course of a few years, he managed to fill the list with a diverse group of Sagrantino producers, and others eventually followed suit. Adanti, Scacciadiavoli, Antonelli, Antano; the list continued to grow over time. In the end Roberto would be credited for almost singlehandedly bringing that grape to the attention and adoration of the American market.

I believe his success derived from the fact that although he had worked in wine for years, Roberto wasn’t a wine guy. He was a seeker of stories. As it happened in his life, the avenue through which he told his stories was a wine list and that has been great for us and everyone who walks into il Buco. Distributors across the city love working with him for this reason and more. His reputation grew steadily over time with a respect that few received in the industry, in spite of his playful title of curmudgeon. Some of the relationships run long and deep and led to lasting friendships with distributors who have become part of the fabric of il Buco, like Violante Lepore of Selected Estates. Friends such as Livio Panebianco and Ned Benedict, who, sadly, are no longer with us, we honor in this book.

In building the list, Roberto continually sought like-minded travelers. He built our portfolio less around the wines themselves and more around the people behind them. This relationship-focused philosophy defines the heart of our wine program. We work mostly with small family producers who respect the terroir from which their wines originate, allowing the peculiarities of the soils and the regions from which they come to emerge. These are the “ugly ducklings” that resonated so strongly with him as a boy.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Roberto Paris at Domaine du Gros Chesnay; cellar, Maison Billecart-Salmon, Mareuil-sur-Ay, France; Tom Byrnes at Domaine du Gros Chesnay; wine tasting il Buco cellar; country road, Loire Valley, France; Alain Passard kitchen; sunflower field, Roncofreddo, Italy

Roberto and Joaquin, Caprai Vineyards

Roberto and I have taken many journeys together in search of those kindred spirits. These journeys took us to San Gimignano, where Elisabetta Fagiuoli, a self-taught eighty-eight-year-old nonna, has done for Vernaccia what Marco Caprai did for Sagrantino; to the extreme corner of northern Patagonia, where Piero Incisa—the scion of the iconic Sassicaia wine family—exiled himself in an abandoned vineyard to test his mettle. The wine he makes there at Bodega Chacra is 100 percent old vine pinot noir made biodynamically.

We traveled through Spain, from Rioja to Penedès, Rias Baixas and the Duero, with André Tamers, a renegade Spanish wine importer, to taste the wines of Sastre, Do Ferreiro, and Emilio Rojo, some of our all-time favorite producers. Most recently we’ve collaborated with Pepe Raventos in bringing his glorious vintages of sparkling and still wines from the Penedès to our newest outpost in Ibiza, across the sea from his Catalan winery.

We’ve taken many visits to California with Rob and Maria Sinskey, walking through their biodynamic vineyard in the Napa Valley. Their beautiful wines, and those of André, are brought to us in New York City by our friend and distributor Tom Byrnes. The connections are endless. Last year in celebration of our shared twenty-fifth anniversaries we met Tom and a host of those mutual friends for a lunch at the farm of Alain Passard and toasted our shared passion with the wines of Billecart-Salmon.

At this point, Roberto is family. He and Joaquin have a relationship that runs deeper than I can fathom. Roberto has come to know my palate like no one else. I can fondly remember all the family holidays when he racked his brain to find just the right wine to please my dad, and how tickled he was when my dad chose Sagrantino.

Last summer, we traveled back to Foligno. It was the first time Roberto had been back to Umbria in five years, the first time he had returned to his village since an earthquake had rendered his family home uninhabitable in 2016. It was nevertheless joyous. We went to visit our friend Marco Caprai for a picnic at the winery, which began with fresh ripe figs drizzled with the best Moraiolo olive oil. (Again, those wonderful figs!) Marco drove us through the neatly planted vineyard. From the early muddied rootstocks, now each row of vines has its own distinct character, accomplished by decades of hard work. Twenty-five years after Roberto walked into il Buco, the fate of Sagrantino looked drastically different. Marco himself has flourished, his destiny tied to this grape, his father Arnaldo’s legacy firmly in his hands.

Watching Roberto walk with Joaquin through the brilliant leaves of the vineyard, his village on the opposite hillside, I saw him, for the first time in a long time, at home. This experience is in many ways what Roberto has created at il Buco. Descending into the wine cellar and drinking one of the many bottles lining those caves is like taking a journey to any number of places around the world and somehow managing to feel more at home than you ever have before.

“I met Roberto the first night in my apartment on Bond Street when the rumbling of the 6 train kept me awake. He brought me a wine from Puglia and four perfectly seared pieces of tuna dressed with the most extraordinary olive oil. For more than 20 years I’ve been going to il Buco for something special, to remind me that the rumble of the 6 train isn’t a rumble at all but the distant roll and wash of the Mediterranean.”

—LIEV SCHREIBER