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is how I rationalized the choice to put a car, my 1967 Ferrari 330 GT, in the middle of the store. Yes, plunking a sixteen-foot-long vehicle in the middle of our selling floor made no real economic sense. But with its wire wheels and wooden steering wheel, the 1960’s Ferrari symbolized a carefree, dolce vita dream—exactly how the store should feel and, in my mind’s eye, what I wanted my life to become. Home above, store below. Working with wine at my fingertips and a dog at my feet.
    As a child, not everything I learned about wine was from Italy. My mother, a New Yorker by way of Baltimore, loved good wine but hated pretension. At our home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Mom preferred Gigondas, the hearty Rhône red, to its more famous neighbor Châteauneuf-du-Pape; white Burgundy Meursault to more headline-grabbing Montrachet; Beaumes de Venises to the more prestigious Sauternes. She liked to appreciate the overshadowed, and this may explain why I feel comfortable offering under-the-radar wines in the store.
    As my father spent more time in Italy with Lisetta, Mom encouraged experimentation. In the 1970s, she allowed her ten-year-old to collect
digestivi
in miniature bottles and to “taste test” thimblefuls of those bitter herbal concoctions side by side.I think she’d smile if she knew that thirty years later I would still be playing a version of that game.
    My mom was also the only non-wine professional I have ever met who could recite the Bordeaux Classification of 1855, the five-tiered wine-ranking system.
    Although she had advanced Alzheimer’s disease by the time we conceived of the store; Mom’s informed, but relaxed, approach to wine pervades the place.
    Becky’s boss, Martha Stewart, reminds me a lot more of Lisetta than of my mom. Both Martha and Lisetta meld bluntness and brisk efficiency with a sense of style and a captivating persona. Yet both women melt around animals. Coincidentally, Martha used to rent a house in Camaiore, our tiny Italian town.
    I don’t want you to get the wrong idea: despite her being my wife’s employer of more than ten years, Martha and I are not exactly bosom buddies. But her point of view permeated our store vision almost as much as Lisetta’s. Martha edits. She hones. She is relentless. With over twenty-four thousand domestic and international wines available in this country, we knew we had a lot to sift through. And we would have to be as demanding as Becky’s boss.
    The other Martha message, by way of Mies van der Rohe, the modernist architect, is that details matter. It’s not enough to have a hazy sketch of an idea. You must fill it in with the same conviction as the big picture. Martha is why we use the perfect saddle-stitched chocolate brown grosgrain ribbon to wrap bottles; why we have a cork business card that’s also a magnet; why our gift cards are engraved with calligraphic fish.
    One of the most attractive qualities about Martha is her insatiable curiosity. She loves an expert and will ask question afterquestion, as Ryan Ibsen, our wine director can attest. She’s a great interrogator and can sift quickly, probe, find the secret. For Martha, we reminded ourselves, every day is an opportunity to learn more.
    We had a lot to learn about wine and also, as it turns out, about parenting: in October 2004, we discovered that the co-founder of our soon-to-be shop (Becky) was pregnant with a boy. At least our dream now had a name, Pasanella & Son.
    As her belly grew, so did our anxiety. Among the biggest open questions: Who were we going to get to run this money-sucking enterprise? Then, as if scripted, came a fateful encounter on a last-minute run to Whole Foods.
    I was preparing for Becky’s thirtieth birthday and ran out to pick up a loaf of bread and a few odds and ends. I left Whole Foods with more than $200 worth of cheese thanks to the energetic sales clerk behind the counter.
    “You know that Tomme would go perfectly with a bottle of slightly chilled