Urgent
Need for Dom Perignon?
Try Milan's Peck:
Jan. 20 (Bloomberg)
– Let’s say you’re in a taxi easing your way through
Milan’s traffic maze and you’re suddenly gripped by a
desire to have 50 bottles of Dom Perignon that evening. This is what
to do: You whip out your cell phone and call the wine store at Milan’s
vast food emporium, Peck (9 Via Spadari; (39) (02) 802-3161; http://www.peck.it.
While you’re at it, how about a few bottles of Sassicaia, a
rare Tuscan wine at 2,590 euros ($3,373.86) for the 1985 vintage?
Done. That’s exactly what happened recently when Peck heard
from a Turkish businessman calling from a taxi. It’s only somewhat
unusual for Peck, which is used to being asked to deliver extraordinary
wines on a moment’s notice and with dispatch. Since Peck is
Italy’s largest wine store, such requests are not uncommon.
With 5,000 selections and 14,000 bottles in the wine store and another
150,000 bottles stored elsewhere, Peck rarely disappoints customers.
There are hundreds of French labels, although there’s not much
call for California wines. “Italian wine is the core of Peck’s
collection,” Peck’s representative Stefano Garbaldi says
matter-of-factly. “And a lot of Champagne.” That includes
22 Nebuchadnezzars, the equivalent of 20 regular 750-millimeter bottles
in one big bottle of Crystal. “We have every vintage of Sassicaia,
dating back to the first, in 1968,” Garibaldi says.
Rare Vintages
By comparison, the largest Italian wine store in the U.S., Italian
Wine Merchants (http://www.italianwinemerchant.com)
in New York, stocks about 1,000 selections. “Peck is an institution
and has set the standards of globalization for selling wine,”
says Sergio
Espostio, managing majority partner of Italian Wine Merchants.
“They were the innovators in selling wine over the Internet,
and their clientele is very international and looking for the rarest
of the rare. Unfortunately for American connoisseurs, it’s illegal
to ship wines from Europe to the U.S.” With Harrods Food Hall
in London and Fauchon in Paris, it is one of Europe’s gastro-extravaganzas.
Opened as a grocery in 1883 by a Czech named Franz Peck, it started
to grow its gargantuan size after the Stoppani brothers bought the
place in 1970. In 1982, they opened the wine store, overseen by Mario
Stoppani.
By John Mariani
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