Suddenly, Sena's brown eyes lit up with a devilish gleam as he recalled childhood antics with his brothers - "We used to steal his wine" - and delightedly proceeded to describe how they used a long, hollow pasta noodle, like an uncut ziti, to drink the wine from the large demijohn bottles in which his grandfather stored his wine. Occasionally, the straw would accidentally fall in and ruin the whole batch. "Then, oh boy, were we punished."
Today, the family's wine collection is kept locked behind sturdy metal gates in a temperature-controlled wine cellar below the Senas' restaurant, La Famiglia on Front Street. Luca's First is only one of the nearly 13,000 bottles stored in La Famiglia's underground wine cellar, which is undoubtedly the finest collection of Italian wines in Philadelphia - and one of the best in the country. Although the restaurant's wine list features more than 175 labels (many of them with hefty markups, I might add), that's less than half of the selection stored in the cellar.
"I am buying wines for the future. They might not be ready to drink for 25 years, but in a couple of years you won't even be able to find them. They're for my children and nephews - I probably won't be here to enjoy them."
When does he decide to put his wines on the restaurant's wine list? "When they're ready!"
Sena and his brothers regularly conduct informal wine-tastings to check on the progress of the wines. "If a wine's not drinking well, I'd be embarrassed to sell it."
According to Sena, there are basically two types of Italian wines: the cheap, cheerful quaffs, made to drink young, and the serious stuff that ''makes you go back and sniff again and again, and each time you find more." These are the good wines that, he said, "speak for themselves." Sena concerns himself with the latter.
