Our correspondent remembers a fine restaurant much admired by wine-loving New Yorkers
Immediately after terrorists toppled the World Trade Center, wine and thoughts about wine seemed trivial, escapist. But perspective has been restored, because perspective - heightened horizons, literally and figuratively - is what the towering landmark brought to ordinary life and to wine life.
The Center and its restaurants, particularly Windows on the World, on the north tower's 106th and 107th floors, and the Hudson River Club, in the adjacent World Financial Center, were synonymous with New Yorkers' wine and culinary pleasures. About 70 Windows employees, including the pastry chef, Heather Ho, and about 235 guests are among the missing.
It isn't only Windows's immense wine cellar - one of the city's greatest - and its plausible prices that will linger in memory. Wine lovers will also remember impeccable, virtually personal wine service at Windows's restaurants-within-a-restaurant: Cellar in the Sky and, later, Wild Blue.
Britain's link to Windows comes to mind, too. Witty tastings led by the incisive and urbane Clive Coates, who seems underappreciated in America, and Decanter magazine's simultaneous Manhattan-and-London taste-off, to compare and contrast Americans' and Britons' palates.
Windows's spacious banquet rooms provided ideal settings for tutored tastings, commercial showcasing and producers' dinners. From scores of visits over 17 years, I will fondly remember lifting glasses with such members of winedom's roster of excellence as Hubert Trimbach (Alsace), Peter M F Sichel (Bordeaux), Rainer Lingenfelder (Pfalz, Germany), Bernard Portet (Clos du Val, California), Bertold Salomon (managing director, Austrian Wine Marketing Board), Angelo Gaja (Italy) and Alex and Louisa Hargrave (founders of Long Island's wine industry).
Windows fostered the career of its longtime wine director, the irreverent Kevin Zraly, who is arguably America's most famous - certainly most outrageously entertaining - wine teacher, as well as the careers of Michael Skurnik, a premiere New York distributor, and such well-known sommeliers as Andrea Immer (author of Great Wine Made Simple) and Ralph Hersom of Le Cirque 2000.
Zraly's classes at Windows have been sold out forever; his Windows on the World Complete Wine Course, updated yearly, has long been perhaps America's best-selling wine book.
Zraly is safe, as are executive chef Michael Lomonaco, general manager Glenn Vogt, and David Emil, the chief executive officer.
The Hudson River Club, in a damaged section of the financial district complex, integrated its cuisine, using fresh Hudson Valley farm products, with stellar New York wines. The annual statewide wine contest, a two-day affair, was held there in August. A tasting of the winning wines had been scheduled for September 11 but had been canceled.
Oddly, Windows and its banquet rooms were impersonal and not especially pretty. The cloud formations at eye level and the sparkling harbor with the Statue of Liberty were greater attractions. The architecture, low ceilings, uninspired decorations and wraparound windows brought to mind a comfortable small-town airport. How ironic that two jetliners ended its earthly mission.
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