You do find Maltese anywhere and everywhere.
The latest to be discovered has been for many long years selling wine right in the Wall Street area, New York’s financial district, round the corner from the World Trade Center.
The Maiden Lane Wine & Liquor, a business about 60 years old, stands in an area where the old meets the new, as office buildings give way to apartments housing recent college grads.
Maiden Lane owner Peter Muscat offers free local delivery.
Muscat has changed a few things since the new apartment buildings opened and other wine bars came to the area, such as pushing closing time back from 7:30pm to 9pm (but he opens, as always, at 8am).
Muscat’s store remains closed on Sunday, but he knows this may have to change as well. “I wouldn’t like to but I guess in the future I will probably have to open on Sunday,” he said. The ordinary black and gold plastic bags have already been replaced with red bags displaying the business name and, Muscat points out, words that read “Est. 50 years.”
Muscat’s place – a narrow tunnel that hugs the customer – feels dark and rich. It seems to hold the history that characterises its location, a street where Thomas Jefferson dined with James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, a street that watched the rise of the Twin Towers in 1973.
Muscat, who started working for Maiden Lane Wine & Liquor as a child more than 35 years ago, appears to hold a bit of that history himself.
To hear him tell it, Muscat developed his taste for wine before he even mastered solid foods. He was born in Malta, and, he says: “We were born with wine in our mouth.” He is usually assisted by his wife, Angela. “You know what my wife, sitting over there, tells me?” he said with a smile. “My wife tells me, ‘you do all the talking here, and when you get home, you say nothing else.’”
“We’re still doing all right,” Muscat said. “My biggest hit was 9/11, but we survived; we’re still here... It’s like home here to me.”
To his left, the sign on the wall reads, “Keep this place in mind, for a better one is hard to find.”
Maiden Lane Wine & Liquor, www.maidenlanewines.com, 6 Maiden Lane 212-267-8430.