Wine Spectator

The storm devastated large parts of the Northeast; now restaurateurs, wine retailers and wineries are assessing damages and serving their customers as best they can

By Mitch Frank and James Molesworth

Days after Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, people from Virginia to Rhode Island are trying to put their lives back together, but it is not proving easy. Large swaths of the region are still without electricity. On New Jersey’s shoreline, the damage is devastating, and it will take years to rebuild several ocean-front communities. The story was the same in parts of Staten Island and in the Far Rockaways, in New York’s borough of Queens. In less impacted areas, residents struggled to deal with no power, no water, limited mass transit and long lines for gas. As of Friday, the death toll in the United States and Canada stood at 95, 40 of them in New York City.

Restaurant owners are confronting many of the same problems as their customers. Top restaurants from Delaware to Rhode Island took heavy damage, including severe flooding. Some Jersey Shore restaurants were left buried in sand dunes when the waters retreated, while others were washed out to sea.

At Fort Defiance, a popular spot for dinner, cocktails and great coffee in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, owner St. John Frizell reported that he found six inches of water in his dining room and a completely flooded basement. A few neighborhoods away, at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, River Cafe has been a favorite dining spot since 1977. It’s also known for great wine, holding a Best of Award of Excellence from Wine Spectator. Monday night the storm surge came flooding in, filling the dining room and kitchen with four feet of water.

On the other side of the river, restaurants and retailers in lower Manhattan faced similar flooding. Pasanella and Son, a wine store near South Street Seaport, withstood six feet of water, owner Marco Pasanella reported on the store’s Facebook page. The staff had moved much of the inventory upstairs, but the damage is still substantial.

Bernie Sun, wine director for the Jean-Georges restaurant group, has three restaurants downtown, all currently without power: ABC Kitchen, Mercer Kitchen and Perry Street. “I’m not too worried about the wine at Mercer Kitchen or ABC Kitchen. There’s some water in there, but luckily not too much wine in the basements. I’ve got to cross my fingers that the water didn’t get into the basement at Perry Street, though. That’s in the worst shape, as it is on the West Side Highway,” said Sun. “But still, without power at this time of year, the restaurants are cold, and they’re in the dark, so in that regard, the wine is safe. And the bottles are sealed, so if they do go under water, it’s like the deep-sea storage you hear about. Fingers crossed, though.”

Grand Award winner Tribeca Grill seems to have escaped major damage in its wine cellar. “We keep everything in three cellars below the restaurant, and so it can be affected by storms,” said wine director David Gordon. “But we took some precautions before Sandy hit, like raising everything out of the bottom bins. It looks like we got lucky there. The grill is closed, though, and can’t reopen until power is restored.”

On higher ground in Manhattan, the big obstacle was a lack of electricity. As of Friday, most neighborhoods below 29th Street were still without power. The Consolidated Edison utility company hopes to restore power in Manhattan sometime Saturday, while areas outside the borough could be without power for another week.

Andrew Carmellini, the chef at the Dutch in SoHo and Locanda Verde in Tribeca, had been gearing up for his annual Trufflepalooza festival at the latter with $16,000 worth of truffles. As of Friday, he was concerned they would spoil before he could serve them. David Chang, chef at Momofuku and three other downtown hotspots, saw the power problems coming and moved his supplies to a refrigerated facility in Williamsburg. But as the days went by without restored power, time was running out to use the food. Joe Bastianich and Mario Batali were not even that lucky. Several of their restaurants, including Grand Award winner Del Posto, as well as Babbo and the market/eatery Eataly, were powerless, and tens of thousands of dollars worth of food had to be thrown out.

Even during catastrophe, however, people need to eat. Restless and hungry, New Yorkers began looking for places to dine (and possibly recharge their cellphones) by Tuesday. Downtown, dozens of venues opened their doors despite the lack of electricity. Some relied on generators, while others put out candles and served what they could. Outside the Old Homestead Steakhouse, an Award of Excellence winner, cooks prepared steaks on charcoal grills on the curb at Ninth Avenue. The city health department warned restaurateurs that despite the emergency conditions, food needed to be safe. Local media reported that a few chefs were searching all over town for dry ice to keep food chilled.

Food trucks also headed downtown, in many case offering free food for emergency responders and others. By Friday, officials in the waterfront town of Hoboken, N.J., were asking the trucks to come across the Hudson River.

Even in Atlantic City, N.J., not far from where the eye of the storm came ashore, places were trying to get back in business. The Borgata hotel and casino planned to reopen Friday night. A publicist said the Borgata’s five fine-dining restaurants had suffered little damage; one would open Friday and the remainder on Saturday.

Thankfully, area wine regions seemed to suffer minimal damage. Winemakers on Long Island’s East End report that harvest finished before Sandy’s arrival and that storm damage is minimal. “The North Fork is in pretty good shape,” said Rich Olsen-Harbich, winemaker at Bedell Cellars. “All grapes were picked about a week before, so it was all in the tanks. We just lost power for about four hours.” Most of New Jersey’s wineries are located inland and were spared the worst of the storm. But with electricity out, it’s not clear if winemaking was impacted. The Garden State Winegrowers Association website advised potential visitors that many wineries were closed.

By week’s end, chefs were looking for bigger ways to help the storm’s victims. Chang and his team were cooking a six-course dinner at Cafe Boulud on the Upper East Side on Friday night for $495 a person, with all proceeds to go to the Red Cross. In Williamsburg, the staff at The Brooklyn Kitchen was collecting supplies to take to those in need in the Rockaways.

Sadly, the recovery will be long and costly. According to an early estimate from the economists at Moody’s Analytics, losses could approach $50 billion. While $30 billion of that is from storm damage, another $20 billion is from lost economic activity for restaurants, airlines and hotels. For now, chefs and sommeliers across the region were keeping their heads down and just trying to make it through each day.

The latest excerpts from Unfiltered, our weekly column on the intersection of wine, politics, entertainment, sports, business and more.

Sir Winston Churchill was a famously ardent lover of Champagne and perhaps its poet laureate, too: “A single glass of Champagne imparts a feeling of exhilaration. The nerves are braced, the imagination is stirred, the wits become more nimble.” Though we prefer his more quippy stuff: “Remember, gentlemen, it’s not just France we are fighting for: It’s Champagne!” And like the British Bulldog, we too are “easily satisfied with the best.” So it’s only proper that his family’s ancestral home and his birthplace, Blenheim Palace, has become the first such residence in the U.K. to open a Champagne bar (the grandiose 18th-century monument to Baroque excess is a tourist attraction, though the Duke of Marlborough still lives there). Though the royals prefer Bollinger, Blenheim serves Besserat, Lanson, a Blenheim label made by Baron-Fuenté, a selection of “savoury plates” and “afternoon tea bonbon trays” and—of course—the Pol Roger Cuvée Winston Churchill.

Meanwhile, at the recently opened Barclay’s Center stadium for the Brooklyn Nets, the Duke of Brooklyn, Jay-Z, has his Champagne of choice flowing at both the Vault, which is a private VIP club, and an outlet of his 40/40 sports bar/nightclub hybrid. As regular readers of this column know, that tipple is Armand de Brignac’s Ace of Spades, whose gold-plated bottles are stacked floor to ceiling in the Vault, where the likes of Unfiltered will never see them.

Going beyond homeowner’s coverage may be the safer bet

Peter D. Meltzer

A storm knocks out your power for a week and, by the time you return home, the interior temperature in your climate-controlled wine storage unit reads 95° F. A fire ignites in your basement, engulfing your entire wine cellar in flames.

Your hand slips while decanting a bottle of Château Pétrus 1982, sending the bottle and its precious contents crashing to the floor.

Hopefully, in any of these instances you have insurance. But does that mean you’re actually insured?

Just because you have a homeowner’s policy doesn’t mean that your wine cellar is fully protected. Basic homeowner’s coverage is usually limited to theft or fire. A policy that insures your house for $1 million only covers your dwelling for that amount. It may also include an additional 50 percent of contents coverage, meaning a $1 million policy reimburses the homeowner for closer to $1.5 million. But because wine is included in the contents portion of your home, it is important to find out if your contents coverage is sufficient for covering not only your furnishings, clothing and other household goods, but also your wine collection.

Most homeowner’s policies are further subject to a deductible clause, which can range from hundreds to thousands of dollars. That means you might receive only a fraction of the value of your collection in the event that it is stolen or destroyed.

Ideally, a wine collection, like other valuables such as silver, antiques, coins or fine jewelry, should be separately insured against fire, breakage and theft. If you have a collection worth several thousand dollars, there are two options worth considering: a blanket policy or a stand-alone wine insurance policy. Both cost about the same and give you considerably better coverage than a standard homeowner’s policy.

A blanket policy insures your wine under one lump sum and is appropriate for bottles valued at less than $1,000 each. All you have to do is total the value of the wine to be insured. While no documentation is required, hiring a professional appraiser to itemize your collection can help determine if a blanket policy is right for your entire collection.

A stand-alone policy insures your wines individually and is suitable for collections full of expensive items like older wines or rare large-format bottles. Many collectors opt for a blended policy, scheduling their more expensive bottles and blanketing the less expensive ones.

Under most blanket policies, the maximum coverage per bottle is $10,000. So if someone insures $100,000 worth of wine under a blanket policy, yet happens to have a $25,000 bottle stolen from his cellar, the payout for that bottle would be limited to $10,000. If the same bottle were itemized in a stand-alone policy, it could be covered for up to 150 percent of its original cost, depending on the percentage set by the insurer at the time the policy is made. Thus the “deemed replacement cost” of a $25,000 bottle could be as high as $37,500. In addition, it’s incumbent upon the policy holder to notify his insurance company of any significant increase in the value of his wine collection. A wine listed in the books for $2,000 that has a current value of $10,000 may end up being underinsured.

The premium you pay and the exact coverage you get is a function of your specific insurer. Wine insurance premiums are fairly standard. They cost between 42 and 50 cents per $100 of coverage, which means the typical premium on a $50,000 cellar will run about $250. (Policy holders in California may pay an additional 20 percent for earthquake coverage.) However, unless the applicant already has a homeowner’s or automobile policy with the company in question, few insurers will write a blanket or stand-alone policy for less than a $500 premium; it’s simply not cost-efficient.

All wine insurance policies protect against theft and fire. No deductibles apply against a covered claim. But what happens to the ‘82 Pétrus that is dropped instead of stolen? A few insurers cover their policy holders against accidental breakage. Some provide limited spoilage coverage due to the failure of refrigeration equipment. Others will completely cover wines housed in a storage facility that are damaged due to a mechanical breakdown caused by fire or lightning (but not poor maintenance). Yet others provide full coverage due to equipment malfunction.

For obvious reasons, most companies require that the insured have a central station alarm system for fire and theft. Unfortunately, there is no coverage for a corked, ullaged or madeirized bottle.

The French scientist argued that red wine was part of a healthy lifestyle, most famously in a 60 Minutes report that sparked a sales boom

Mitch Frank

Serge Renaud, a French medical researcher known as “the father of the French paradox,” died Oct. 28 in a small town in the Médoc, north of the city of Bordeaux. He was 85. According to French media reports, Renaud, accompanied by his companion and longtime assistant Dominique Lanzmann, left his porch for his regular walk down to the beach when he collapsed. He had suffered a stroke in 2003 and was retired, but was still a vocal advocate of the health benefits of wine.

Renaud became known worldwide in 1991 when he appeared on the CBS news show 60 Minutes, discussing why France had lower rates of cardiovascular disease than America, even though people in both countries consumed fatty diets. Renaud argued that the French people’s regular, moderate consumption of wine with meals, particularly red wine, was a significant reason for their better health. Before that moment, almost all medical research treated alcohol as a risk factor, never as part of a healthy lifestyle. Renaud’s argument not only dramatically increased red wine sales in America, it launched a new wave of research exploring wine and alcohol’s health benefits that continues today.

Half-French, half-Canadian, Renaud grew up in the Bordeaux region, where his grandfather had a vineyard in Entre-Deux-Mers. As he told Wine Spectator in 1994, in his home, children learned healthy eating habits early—lots of bread, fruit, vegetables, olive oil, cheese and, yes, some wine. “When I left France at the age of 20 to study in Canada, I couldn’t imagine there was a population in the world that didn’t drink wine with meals,” he said. His time in Montreal and visits to America surprised him. He couldn’t believe how rare wine was on American tables. Something else caught his attention. “I was struck by the coronary heart disease rates in America, the dietary habits of Americans and the absence of wine. After taking my doctorate in cardiovascular diseases in 1960, I decided to explore the relationship between nutrition and heart disease.”

By the ’70s, Renaud was director of the Lyon-based research unit on nutrition and cardiology at INSERM, France’s National Institute of Health and Medical Research. His most famous work examined diets in industrialized countries, specifically France and the United Kingdom. He argued that as countries grew more wealthy, people’s diets grew more fatty. But France had a much lower rate of cardiovascular disease than England, and he argued that red wine had an ameliorating effect on a fatty diet.

After Renaud appeared on 60 Minutes in November of 1991, his research had a big impact on American wine consumption. During the episode, Morley Safer interviewed Renaud. At one point Safer held up a glass of red wine and proclaimed that the answer to France’s low rate of heart disease “may lie in this inviting glass.” In the ’80s, U.S. wine sales were growing, but slowly, and white wine was fashionable. In 1992, sales of red table wine increased by a whopping 39 percent, following a 4.5 percent decrease between 1980 and 1990, according to Impact, a sister publication of Wine Spectator.

Before the report, many researchers had seen evidence that wine or alcohol might have health benefits, especially for heart health. But heavy alcohol consumption was a big risk factor, so any possible benefits of wine were ignored. That changed in the ’90s. Today, moderate alcohol consumption’s role is still not understood. Researchers can’t even agree whether alcohol alone or something specific to red wine is good for cardiovascular health. And some suggest Renaud’s findings were too simplistic, and that other parts of the French diet, such as olive oil, fish and vegetables, also explain better heart health. But new studies continue to find health benefits in wine, even if those benefits are not fully understood.

Renaud didn’t always have an easy time finding French government funding for his work, but he kept at it until his stroke in 2003. Retiring to his beloved Bordeaux, he was a passionate advocate for wine until the end. As he told a journalist with the local newspaper Sud Ouest, “As a boy, I remember my father bringing wine to an ailing parent’s bed. I imagined it was a folk remedy. Now I know he was right.”