The Juice (10 page)

Historical records have nothing to say about the selection of beverages at the tavern owned by James Howell, which stood on the site of the present hotel when British forces occupied Sag Harbor in 1777, although Madeira and rum were at that time the favorite tipples of the colonists. The commanding officer of the redcoats was captured there in a daring midnight raid by Lieutenant Colonel Return Jonathan Meigs, a veteran of Bunker Hill, who crossed over from New Haven with 234 men in thirteen whaleboats. Meigs and his men killed or captured most of the British garrison, seized tons of supplies—including ten hogsheads of rum—and made it
back to New Haven without the loss of a single American soldier. Despite the success of Meigs’s raid, it took many years for Sag Harbor to recover from the devastation of the occupation. Ultimately, prosperity arrived as Sag Harbor became a major whaling port in the early part of the nineteenth century, when the American Hotel was built on the site of Howell’s tavern. Its watering holes then were notorious enough to earn a censorious mention in
Moby-Dick:
“Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there … poor Queequeg gave it up for lost.”

Sag Harbor’s prosperity ended almost simultaneously with the discovery of gold in California. Whales were becoming scarce, and coal oil was replacing whale oil; most of the whaling ships sailed for San Francisco carrying many of the town’s able-bodied young men. When Ted Conklin bought the American Hotel in 1972, it was a derelict shell with a coal stove and four outhouses. The cellar, now the repository of thousands of great bottles, was knee-deep in coal ash, which Conklin carried up the narrow stairs one bucket at a time. Sag Harbor was a blue-collar town, a dowdy stepchild of the fashionable summer resort towns of Southampton and East Hampton, albeit one with a strong literary tradition stretching back to James Fenimore Cooper’s sojourn. John Steinbeck, Nelson Algren, and Spalding Gray lived here for many years; E. L. Doctorow, Wilfrid Sheed, and Thomas Harris all have homes in Sag Harbor. Conklin envisioned a place where plumbers and writers could mix, although there are probably more of the latter than the former these days, particularly in the summer, when Sag Harbor is invaded by well-heeled New Yorkers.

Only twenty-three at the time, Conklin had already opened and operated a successful restaurant in nearby Westhampton, rehabilitated a farm in upstate New York, gotten married and divorced. Although he’d been born in the city and spent his early years in suburban Manhasset, Conklin had deep roots in Sag Harbor. One of his forebears, Ananias Conklin, was among the first settlers,
taking possession of land that would later be incorporated as Sag Harbor after having been, according to Ted, “kicked out of Salem, Massachusetts, by the same folks who sponsored the witch trials.” Ted Conklin—who recently married his college sweetheart after a chance reunion in Palm Beach—now lives in the house built by Ananias in 1700, and while the purchase of the American Hotel must have seemed like a rash act at the time, he’s clearly a man with a deep sense of history and tradition. He dresses as if he were still at Lawrenceville—blue blazers, chinos, and Top-siders. He’s an avid sailor and has a deep affection for all things nautical, most especially the fifty-year-old seventy-five-foot Trumpy yacht that is docked at the marina just down the street from the hotel. His other great passion is for wine.

His palate seems to have kicked in early. “When I was in school, my parents drank Almaden Mountain Chablis, and I just knew it wasn’t very good. When my mother discovered white Zinfandel, I had to move out of the house.” For those who know Conklin, this story is fairly believable; he has firm opinions in matters of taste and decorum and doesn’t suffer fools, or sweet pink wines, gladly. He has impeccable manners, but it’s not hard to tell when he’s annoyed or bored, even, sometimes, when the subject in question is wine. One gets the sense that his stolid WASP sensibility is slightly at odds with his epic epicureanism.

During his brief stint as a farmer he worked his way through Julia Child’s
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
and learned about wine with the help of such authors as Frank Schoonmaker and Frederick Wildman. “In those days,” he says, “wine meant Bordeaux, and you could afford it. You could actually buy Château d’Yquem.” When he opened the hotel, Conklin was fortunate to have the guidance of a wine aficionado and distributor named Gus Gantz, who helped him stock the cellar of the hotel, after Conklin had excavated it, with Bordeaux, some of which is still resting comfortably there. He hired a French chef and has gone through
many in the intervening years; the menu has always been fairly French, with a focus on local seafood.

Although he may have forgotten one or two of his chefs, he seems to remember every wine purchase, including the price. “One of my first purchases was the ’66 Calon-Ségur,” he tells me as he leads me into the labyrinth of the cellar. “It was $36 a case.” The cellar, though very clean, looks utterly chaotic, with stacks of wooden cases and cardboard boxes creating narrow alleys and a wide variety of shelves and racks, but it’s all accounted for on an Excel program that tells him and his staff the location of each bottle.

In the early days the list, currently 114 pages, focused mainly on Bordeaux, and it still has an amazing selection of treasures from that region, from the 1961 Gruaud Larose ($795) to the 2006 Lafite Rothschild ($1,400)—including many wines that are priced well below what they’d fetch at auction—although he believes that the great growths of Bordeaux are becoming too expensive. As much as he loves these wines, he seems offended by the idea of anyone spending four figures for a bottle. “The first-growth Bordeaux are becoming commodities. Once they become commodities, they don’t have a place at the table.” But he can’t quite seem to break the Bordeaux habit—I notice many cases of expensive 2005s and 2006s—including Petrus and Lafite—among the stacked cases.

The cellar would be extraordinary if only for its collection of older vintages, including an extensive list of Burgundies, but it also reflects the new reality of the global wine village. Conklin keeps up, and he is currently very enthusiastic about New Zealand whites, Sonoma Pinot Noirs, and Argentinean Malbecs. He’s also been a longtime booster of the top Long Island wines. Sitting on the front porch of the hotel, in between greeting the passersby on the sidewalk, he tells me, “There’s never been more good wine in the world than there is today.” And Ted Conklin is still discovering it and buying it, somehow finding more space in the cellar.

“This is New York,” Julian Niccolini says, looking out over the famous Philip Johnson–designed Grill Room where Barbara Walters, Charlie Rose, and Governor George Pataki are eating lunch. “They know what they want. They know wine. They like to show off.” He is explaining why a restaurant that has probably done more than any other to shape how Americans drink and perceive wine has no sommelier. “Since the beginning we had the idea that the customer knows what he wants.”

The lack of a gatekeeper to the cellar is just one of the ways in which the Four Seasons remains the quintessential American restaurant. The restaurant’s approach to wine, like its approach to food and the seating policy, reflects a smooth amalgam of the democratic and the plutocratic, of American informality and New York attitude: the customer is always right—not least because he’s likely to be rich, powerful, and opinionated, or all three. Still, no customer is ever above and beyond Niccolini’s coruscating European wit. Sitting in the serene oasis of the Pool Room with me one night—Grill Room for lunch, Pool Room at night is a formula to go alongside white wine with fish, red wine with meat—he stands briefly to bid farewell to a silver-haired banker with a gorgeous young thing on his arm, then sits again to refill my glass. “He has to get her home right away,” Niccolini tells me. “His little blue pill is kicking in.”

Ever since 1959, when it opened on the ground floor of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building on Park Avenue, the Four Seasons
has had an enormous influence on American cooking, as well as restaurant service and design. If at this point it’s no longer at the cutting edge of the food and wine revolutions it helped to foment, to this day it is exemplary in its approach to wine service and pricing, thanks in no small part to Niccolini, co-owner—with Swiss-born Alex von Bidder—and the guy in charge of the cellar.

From the very start, the Four Seasons was dedicated to showcasing California and even New York wine. In 1976—the same year as the Judgment of Paris in which California wines beat out the French in blind tasting—the then owner Paul Kovi organized the first of its barrel tastings of these wines and brought the word of Napa’s emergence to the most important market in America. Twenty years later, Warren Winiarski of Stag’s Leap vineyard said, “When Paul first invited us back in 1975, it was the first time we were taken seriously outside of California. It was a gesture that gave us all enormous confidence.” The barrel tasting was replaced after a decade by an annual dinner featuring the latest vintage of the top growths of Bordeaux, an event that understandably remains hugely popular. In the meantime, shortly after the first barrel tasting, Kovi and his partner, Tom Margittai, hired Niccolini away from the Palace, then the most expensive restaurant in the country, to run their ailing Grill Room, and he turned it into New York’s premier lunch spot for titans of media, advertising, finance, and fashion.

Niccolini more or less grew up in the food and hospitality business. A former resistance fighter, his father owned a small allpurpose general store in a hilltop town in Tuscany that sold food, wine, and dry goods and served homemade meals. From an early age, Julian was gathering wild porcini, transferring bulk wine from demijohns to small bottles, and helping his mother in the kitchen. At the age of sixteen he went to hotel school in Rome and from there to the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo. Along the way his passion for wine, since he spent most of his vacations exploring
the world’s best vineyards, blossomed into expertise. He first visited Napa in 1977, and in 1979 he got to Montalcino, long before Brunello di Montalcino became famous in this country.

Although Kovi and Margittai had originally hired him for his smooth front-of-the-house skills, they soon handed him responsibility for the cellar and the dinners. Niccolini put together dinners featuring the wines of Montalcino and the Piedmont (home of Barolo and Barbaresco), anticipating and contributing to the explosion of interest in Italian wines in this country.

Today, years after Niccolini and von Bidder took ownership of the restaurant, the urbane Tuscan still runs the wine program single-handedly with a combination of great zeal and insouciance. (“Don’t drink it, it’s crap,” he tells me, without tasting, when a customer sends a carafe of red over to the table.) In an era of wine directors and multiple sommeliers, Niccolini remains something of a passionate amateur, and while his by-the-glass selection is limited and his list conservative, his markups are also blessedly conservative, especially for a restaurant this expensive. The Mont-Redon Châteauneuf-du-Pape from the great 2007 vintage, for instance, was listed for just $77 in October 2011. The 1998 Krug might sound expensive at $390, unless you know that it goes for about $250 at retail. The cult Cabs—Colgin, Araujo, Bond—are represented. The plutocrats can order the 2007 Screaming Eagle for $2,500, while the more frugal may notice the 2007 Newton Unfiltered Cab for $95.

Much as he loves wine, you get the idea that Julian Niccolini wants us to keep it in perspective as an accompaniment to good food, conversation, and flirtation. “Is she attractive?” Niccolini asks, when a captain informs him that a patron wishes to say good-bye. Without waiting for an answer, he gets up and leaves his glass of Condrieu on the table in order to bid farewell to the lady in question.

Although he’s shrunk considerably since I first met him thanks to a long-distance-running habit, Joe Bastianich is cutting a very large figure these days. Once best known as the partner of the chef Mario Batali and the son of the chef Lidia Bastianich, both stars of the small screen, the newly svelte restaurateur has stepped into the spotlight recently. Since 2010 he’s made a name for himself as a judge on Fox’s
Master Chef
. He’s a partner in the hugely successful Eataly, Manhattan’s Disneyland for foodies. And he’s published
Grandi Vini: An Opinionated Tour of Italy’s 89 Finest Wines
. Bastianich has, in fact, created one of the most influential restaurant empires in America, but wine is his great passion, the subject that really gets his juices flowing.

He was born, as it were, into the business. His parents, refugees from Istria, an Italian province annexed by Yugoslavia, had worked in several restaurants in Queens before opening Buona-via in Forest Hills in 1970. “It was a blue-collar thing,” Joe says of those days. Chefs weren’t stars, and young Bastianich fils saw little glamour in the family biz. In 1979, though, they crossed the river to Manhattan, opening Felidia on East Fifty-Eighth Street. Drawing inspiration from Istria and Trieste, Lidia Bastianich’s food was a hit almost from the beginning, highlighting a regional cuisine that was miles, literally and figuratively, from chicken parmigiana and spaghetti and meatballs. God knows I’d never tasted anything like it when my publisher took me there for lunch in 1984, nor had I ever drunk anything like the Barolo he ordered.

Lidia’s son tried to trade restaurant row for Wall Street, spending
three years at Merrill Lynch and Lehman before embarking on a pilgrimage to his ancestral home in 1990, drawn specifically by his passion for wine. “Ninety was a real turning point for Italy, not only a great vintage, but a transition, and I tasted all these great wines in barrel. I worked as a cellar rat from Friuli to Sicily.” In Piedmont he apprenticed with two of the best producers of Barolo (known in Italy as “the king of wines and the wine of kings”), Bruno Ceretto and Luciano Sandrone; in Montalcino he apprenticed with Andrea Costanti.