John gave me his card, I walked down to the doorway of the shop. Construction had begun, but, seated at the dozen or so tables, now more tightly grouped back by the cheese and cold-cuts display case, faithful customers were having sandwiches and soup.
I found John at the far front corner of the shop, where the window facing the street met the bricks of the west wall. He was talking to a man in a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, an architectural drawing open on the floor between them. When John saw me, he excused himself and came over, and the drawing rolled up toward the other man’s foot.
“I want to show you something,” he said. “If you have a minute.”
“I have forty-five minutes.”
He led me back outside and over to the front window of the law offices that took up the remaining two-thirds of the building on the far side of the brick wall. There was no furniture inside, and no people. He said, “I just bought the rest of the place. After we get the trusses installed I’m removing this dividing wall. But see that door over there?” He was starting to light up like a storyteller about to divulge a magical secret. “That’s where you come in.” Centered on the far wall was a door to what might have been a low, narrow storage room.
“That’s an entrance?”
“No, but it would be yours.”
“It looks like a supply closet.”
“It’s a staircase.” He was almost gleeful. “Down.”
I said, “To the basement?”
He said, “Not the basement. The cellar. It’s where the good wine will live. Do you currently have a room where the good wine lives?” He seemed to know that a cool storage area was the only critical lack at the supermarket. Without a cellar, I (or they) would never be able to acquire any truly special wines. To have—to possess and store and eventually sell—to handle truly great wines is, for some members of my world, more important than anything. I looked at the door to the cellar and suddenly felt that in my current situation I was little more than a box-boy.
“I’ll have to talk to my boss.”
“I can help you with that too.” We went back inside, where he pointed toward a table back beside the lit doors of the beverage cooler. There was my boss, manager of the supermarket, involved with a large, awkward sandwich. Sometimes our city has a small-town feel. He was in mid-bite when he saw me, so he indicated with his head and sandwich together to come over.
I sat across from him. “Hi, Bill. Did you know I would be here today?”
He wiped his mouth with a napkin and said, “No, I eat here all the time. Their meatloaf sandwich is a work of art. But I thought you might at some point. If you take his offer I’ll need you for two more weeks.”
It turned out that John had been talking to him for a month, hoping to win me away from the corporate scene with no hard feelings.
Before I went back for the second half of my supermarket shift, John handed me a wine box half filled with catalogs and a pad of art paper. On the first page was a loosely accurate sketch of the law-office wall with the enclosed staircase leading down.
“Start with that and draw me some shelves for wine. You get the whole west wall just as I’ve drawn it, from the front window to the beverage cooler in back, all the way to the ceiling. And think of the top of the cellar staircase as storage space. If you would like, we can put in one of those library ladders that slide along a track. Make it work, and make it handsome. And keep a record of your hours—this will be overtime, mind you, part of your professional day. Try to have something for me by tomorrow or the next day. It doesn’t have to be an artistic masterpiece, but be accurate with the dimensions.”
I agonized over it because my first choice was so expensive. I finished drawing by the end of the first evening and spent the second evening just staring at it, thinking about how much it would cost and how John might take the news. I would be fired before I was hired. Still, I left everything as it was. When I went in, two noons after he had handed me the assignment, he looked over my work, referring to the catalogs where I had bookmarked them. Finally he said, “Looks good.” Just like that. I wanted to hug him.
He went to his office and brought back a check ledger. “How many hours did you put in?”
Because I didn’t want to charge him for the time I’d just sat there thinking about the money, I told him just the one evening. He wrote me a check for both evenings. I said, “Wait. You didn’t hear me.”
He said, “No, it was you who didn’t hear me. I dare you to tell me you didn’t spend both evenings on this.” When I didn’t answer right away, he said, “Thinking is part of the process. Even the big boys sit there and think. Noodle time might be worth more than time of action.”
He looked at my drawings again. “You will have a Wall of Wine.”
I said, “And you will be broke.”
He smiled. “This isn’t the biggest risk I’ve ever taken. I’ll be fine.”
While it was being built, I came to see that it had been a good move on his part to let me design the shelves. The cost was trivial compared to what he spent on the entire remodel, and he was even less experienced with wine-display particulars than I was. And I’m sure he figured I would be happier with my own decisions.
I learned later that he didn’t have as much money as it first seemed. He was generous in certain areas, miserly in others. He kept a copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War on his desk, using it to inform him on business strategies. He said it helped make the correct decision seem obvious.
Along with the wine shelves he also gave me the island, consisting of a series of high, narrow tables made of butcher-block maple, arranged to form a modular bar. There was enough room beneath the tables to store deliveries and have them be out of the way but still close at hand—more than fifty cases could be stacked under the island tables. If you were to order a case of a certain syrah from the Napa Valley, say, and return the next week to get it, you would find it beneath one of the island tables—a box with your name in Magic Marker on the side, along with the arrival date and the price, which would be 10 to 15 percent below the shelf price. I wouldn’t have to be present; you could take it to the cash register, and John would ring it up.
Perhaps because of the remodel, some older people with a lot of money started gathering in the late afternoon every Friday, sharing pricey bottles, talking quietly. They sat at three round tables pushed together into a clover shape, forming a private wine-tasting group that we called the Elders. They insisted on paying retail for the wine; in turn John insisted on providing a plate of baguette slices and a selection of cheeses to go with the wines. The Elders (who were far more familiar with expensive wines than I was at that point) made suggestions as to what might be nice to have on hand next week, and I was able to respond with a regular turnover of upper-end vintages. John raised a concerned brow when he saw the first order sheet, which included two cases priced at over nine hundred dollars each. I was able to assure him that all but three bottles of the twenty-four were already sold, putting us in the black before the cases arrived.
He bowed modestly and said, “Student become teacher.”
At about this time I formed an open-to-the-public tasting for our regular Friday-evening customers. For my own convenience it ran from seven to nine, an hour past closing. Having people stay past closing turned out to be a good move because it instilled in them an allegiance, the result of feeling privileged to remain after the doors were locked. They took the tasting more seriously than they would have otherwise, which allowed them to make better-informed decisions as to what they wanted for their own cellars. This in turn made them happier with what they bought.
For the regulars each week I would pull six wines of a particular grape of interest from the shelves, trying for a range in price and quality (often not related), and end the evening with a real treat, something from the cellar where I kept the treasures that were no longer in distribution. The cellar bottle was to represent what I thought the