Eli picked up her glass and set it in a dish drainer behind the bar.
“Man,” he said, “is she pissed off.”
“You didn’t help.”
“I just played devil’s advocate. You know it’s their right to close their farm. If she takes their head off the way she just did with me, your neighbors are in for it, babe.”
“Sure sounds like it,” I said.
Ryan Worth showed up at five o’clock, just as we closed for the day. I’d warned Quinn he was coming by.
“I’ll be sure to get lost,” he said. “And leave you two lovebirds alone together.”
Ryan had panned one of our wines—our Pinot Noir—in a recent review. Quinn was furious. Without telling me, he called Ryan and gave him a piece of his mind.
Apparently that was the high-water mark of their conversation because after that Ryan brought up Le Coq Rouge, the California vineyard where Quinn worked before joining us. Quinn hadn’t known Ryan’s good friend was Tavis Hennessey, the owner. Nor had he known that Ryan was completely au courant of the scandal involving the winemaker—Quinn’s former boss—who’d gone to jail for selling adulterated wine on the black market in Eastern Europe. Business at the winery tanked and Hennessey finally closed Le Coq Rouge. Though Quinn had never been charged with anything, Ryan had made a when-you-lie-down-with-dogs-you-get-up-with-fleas crack to Quinn. As far as I knew they still weren’t speaking.
“Why did you have to call and yell at him like that?” I’d asked. “I didn’t think the review was fair, either. But you get more with honey than you do with a club.”
“Maybe,” he’d said, “except you don’t feel as good afterward.”
I met Ryan by myself at the ivy-covered archway to the courtyard. A gust of wind blew an unused cocktail napkin that had eluded our cleanup crew in front of us as we walked to the barrel room. I picked up the napkin and stuffed it in my pocket, glad I’d worn a jacket. The temperature had dropped at least twenty degrees since this afternoon.
“Your winemaker joining us?” Ryan asked.
“Unfortunately he’s got another appointment this evening he couldn’t get out of.” With his washing machine.
“Too bad.”
Ryan held the door to the barrel room for me and I hit the lights as we walked in.
“How many lots have we got so far?” he asked.
“Fifty-five and still counting.”
The barrel room smelled of the tangy, slightly acrid odor of fermenting wine. About the size of an Olympic swimming pool, the semiunderground cave had thirty-foot ceilings, fieldstone walls, and four interconnected bays, where most of our oak barrels lay undisturbed in cool darkness. The stainless-steel fermenting tanks stood along the far wall. The gentle gurgling of the glycol-and-water solution circulating inside the refrigeration jackets was soothing as we walked the length of the room.
Ryan pulled out a chair from a long table we used for winemaker’s dinners and private parties. He sat down, flung his briefcase on the table, and took out a reporter’s notebook.
“We’ll take the top forty and put them in the live auction.” He began making notes. “Everything else we’ll do as a silent auction. It’ll take me about ninety minutes to dispense with forty lots. After that, the natives get restless and you don’t get as much bang for the buck.”
Above his head, my mother’s cross-stitched sampler hung over one of the archways leading to the recessed bays. She’d stitched one of her favorite quotes from Plato—“No thing more excellent nor more valuable than wine was ever granted mankind by God.”
I stared at the sampler and nodded. Ryan had brought up things that never would have occurred to me. Thank God he’d agreed to help, fee or no fee.
“How much longer should we keep accepting contributions?” I asked.
“Cut them off soon. I still have to do the write-ups and figure out which ones to do live. Then we’ve got to get the catalog to the printer.”
“Sunny Greenfield will handle the printer,” I said. “We’re using one of my mother’s paintings of the vineyard on the cover.”
“Nice. I always liked her art.” He looked around. “Hey, bartender, any chance of a drink? This is going to take a while.”
I decided against the Pinot and got a bottle of Cab. For the next two hours he checked bottles against the list I’d made, writing about each one in his notebook.
At last he threw down his pen and sat back in the chair, rubbing his eyes with the palms of his hands. “Can we call it quits here? We’ll get those last few on the next round. Plus whatever else comes in.”
“You’re in charge.”
He reached for the bottle of wine. I covered my glass with my hand, so he filled his own.
“You’ve got some nice wines. A few clunkers but I didn’t spot any outright fakes.”
“Can we talk about the Washington bottle?”
“Sure. Where is it?”
It was in a different bay, on its own. I retrieved it and set it on the table in front of him so it wasn’t in the direct beam of an overhead spotlight. The bottle, its contents dark and viscous as blood, gleamed mysteriously.
He picked it up like he was holding the Holy Grail. “Amazing.”
“You’re sure it’s real?”
“Let me give you a little history lesson.” He set the bottle down carefully. “Until the late 1600s, there was no such thing in France as a wine produced by a single château. They mingled the grapes harvested from different places, so what they produced didn’t have much connection with the land.”
“Terroir,” I said, and he nodded.
“Château Margaux—which you’ve got here—was one of the first châteaus to make wine from vines grown solely in their own vineyard. That put them at the head of the curve in wine-making methodology and they stayed there.” He ticked off his fingers. “Two things. Glass and cork. By the time this wine was bottled, heavier glass suitable for aging wine and shipping it had come into use. Plus the French had switched from capping their bottles with a layer of olive oil and wax to using cork.”
He paused to fill his own glass with the last of the Cab. “What was I just saying?”
“Using cork instead of olive oil and wax.”
“Right. So now they could ship wine. By the eighteenth century the Portuguese—the primary suppliers of cork—had invented an elongated bottle with a short neck and a shoulder. Of course since every bottle was blown by mouth the shapes were slightly irregular.” He caressed the Washington wine from the neck down to the flared shoulder with the back of his index finger. “Anyway, the new shape meant the bottles could be stacked on their sides—instead of keeping them upright—so the corks would no longer dry out and the wine wouldn’t spoil. Good for long voyages, like crossing the Atlantic.”
He indicated the Margaux. “This bottle is perfectly consistent with what was historically available in 1790. Also, Thomas Jefferson always asked for his wines—especially his Bordeaux—to be shipped in bottles rather than casks.”
“Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to ship in casks?” I asked.
“Sure, but the odds of the wine he ordered and the wine he got being one and the same were slim to none.” Ryan drank more Cab, then pushed back his chair and hunched down so he was eye level with the broad-shouldered bottle. “If the French—especially in the south of France—hadn’t doctored the wine to fake Jefferson out and give him what he thought he’d ordered, then the men on the boats who brought the wine across the Atlantic or up the river drank their fill of his casks and topped them off with river water afterward so they were still full.”
I made a face. “That is disgusting.”
“Jefferson thought so, too.” He sat up again. “Eighteenth-century wine fraud. We’ve got no monopoly on it. Happened all the time. Which is why TJ insisted on bottles, especially for Bordeaux. And, as we know, not all of those bottles made it to Monticello or Mount Vernon. Like this one.”