“It’ll be great,” I said. “As long as we aren’t picking too late. If we get an overnight freeze while that wine is still sitting in the vats, there goes fermentation until next spring when it warms up again.”
“If we pick early there’ll be too much acid,” he said. “You want people getting heartburn when they drink our wine? It’s a nightmare to fix wine with too much acid.”
“You’re still talking like a Californian,” I said. “Out there you never had to worry about high acidity. If you pick too late your only problem is that the alcohol content goes through the roof.”
His cigar glowed serenely in the dark. “High alcohol content’s easier to take care of than too much acid.”
“Sure,” I said. “You just add water to rehydrate the yeast.”
The minute I said that, I regretted it. I glanced over at him but he was still staring straight ahead, watching the sky. His profile looked like it had been cast in steel.
“I was talking about stuck fermentation,” I said.
“I know you were.” But he sounded brusque and I knew it was because I’d indirectly brought up Le Coq Rouge. “Adding water is not the only way to deal with it, either. You can use a glycol heater.”
“I know.”
Too bad I hadn’t mentioned that instead, though my comment could have hit a nerve for any winemaker. We all wrestled with the dilemma of how much to fiddle with a wine to fix it or improve it, and still consider it the “original” wine. California had problems when their grape sugar stopped converting to alcohol, known as stuck fermentation. In Virginia we had the opposite problem. Our alcohol content was often too low so we added sugar to boost it, a practice known as chapitalising. Both processes meant we were tinkering with the wine—but no winemaker considered them fraudulent.
So if that was okay, was it also acceptable to top off bottles from an outstanding year with a bottle of the same wine from a less stellar year? It was only a small amount of wine and the practice was known as recorking. Had the winemaker diluted the fantastic vintage, or was it still worth the same price? And where did you draw the line at how much was too much?
“I’m sorry,” I said to Quinn.
“Forget it.” He stirred in his chair. “How’d it go with the asshole?”
“You shouldn’t call Ryan that and it went fine. We need him. He knows his stuff.”
“He’s still an asshole.” He puffed again on the cigar. “By the way, Mick left a message at the vineyard earlier. Asked if you’d call him. Something about Amanda and a tent.”
“For the auction. We’ve got so many people coming we might need to move it outside, on account of the Washington wine.”
I wondered why Mick had called the vineyard instead of calling me directly. Maybe he’d tried my dead cell and the mailbox was full. Maybe he just wanted to leave a message and avoid talking to me after the other night.
Quinn read my thoughts. “What’s going on with you two? You back together again?”
“The thing at Mount Vernon was a business-related dinner. That’s all.” I didn’t want to discuss it. “Look, I’d better get inside. We have an early start tomorrow.”
“Yeah, I’m ready to go, too.”
He stood up and held out his hand. I took it and he pulled me up. His skin felt rough and callused. Nothing like Mick’s, who, I’d heard, had a manicurist come to his home on a regular basis.
“Lucie!”
“What?”
“I asked what time you’re getting there in the morning.”
“When are you getting there?”
He rolled his eyes. “I just told you. Six-thirty.”
“Okay, I’ll be there at six-thirty, too.”
He was still holding my hand as we walked through the rose garden. “Watch your step near those thorns.” He let go of my hand once we passed by the roses and fished in his pocket for his car keys. “See you in the morning.”
“Good night.” I didn’t look back, but I was sure he stayed and watched me cross the lawn to the veranda. A moment later I heard his car engine start and the sound of tires on the gravel driveway.
I lay in bed and wondered what, if anything, had just happened between us. Only the other day he’d said what a mistake it had been to start an affair with Bonita. And that it was a bad idea to mix business and personal relationships.
When I finally fell asleep I dreamed I found Valerie’s car on its roof in Goose Creek again and I needed to rescue her. But when I finally managed to fling open the car door, another woman hung suspended in mid-air.
Not Valerie. Me.
Harvest is morning work. We pick when it’s cool and generally stop by noon or shortly afterward, depending on the heat. On this October day, Columbus Day, sunrise came at six forty-five. I woke in darkness just before my alarm went off at six and switched on the light on my bedside table. The local Leesburg radio station promised another Indian summer day once the sun came up. Temperatures in the low eighties. Perfect weather. I dressed and drove over to the vineyard.
Jacques Gilbert, our first winemaker and, unlike Quinn, a classical music aficionado, used to compare the process of growing grapes and making wine to the movements of a symphony. Allegro during spring and summer when the vines flourished and veraison, or ripening, began. Andante in winter when the vineyard was blanketed with snow and the vines were dormant. Harvest was presto, and vivace meant the release of a new wine. I loved his analogy except for harvest, which for me demanded a music of its own. Something Latino that pulsed and throbbed—songs like the ones the men played on their boom boxes as they worked and sang in the fields. Earthy, sensual…with sizzle, flashing skirts, and stiletto heels. Something sexy.
Quinn was working on the pump, which he’d moved to the crush pad by the time I arrived. He was dressed in jeans and a UC-Davis T-shirt that looked new. Probably a gift from Bonita, who’d studied viticulture and enology at Davis. I wondered why he’d worn it today—or if it were just the first clean thing he’d found in his drawer.
Manolo showed up at seven driving Hector’s old Superman blue pickup with our regular crew and half a dozen day laborers from a camp in Winchester sitting in the open back. It still tugged at my heart that Hector wasn’t behind the wheel as he’d been last year. I waved at Manolo, who stopped at the crush pad to let off a few of the men. He waved back and drove on, taking the rest of them out to the fields. By now it was light but the sky was still colorless. I watched the small, dark figures drop gracefully off the back of the truck and pick up yellow lugs at the end of the row before disappearing into the tangle of vines, grapes, and leaves.
No wine can be better than the grapes from which it came. But it can be a lot worse if the winemaker screws anything up—picking at the wrong time or making a bad call during the fermentation process. Quinn looked stressed as he often did at harvest, chewing on an unlit cigar and giving orders in a brusque, businesslike voice. Any tenderness he’d shown last night at the summerhouse had evaporated like morning mist off the vines. I got busy weighing the lugs when they came in filled with grapes. Later Quinn asked me to run the tests in the lab.
By one o’clock we’d picked everything we were going to for the day. I was finishing the last Brix tests when he showed up in the doorway. We’d turned the fans on because fermentation had already started, giving off enough carbon dioxide to kill us both unless we kept the air moving.
“The crew’s cleaning up and Manolo’s hosing off the crush pad.” He had to speak up over the drone of the fans and the noise of the circulation system cooling the whites in the tanks. “I think we’re done here until we have to punch down the cap this evening. I’m going over to Leesburg. I busted the channel lock wrench when I was working on the pump. We need a new one since the pump’s still acting up.”