“That is the winery ahead?” he asked, dumbfounded and not feigning it.
“Yes,” Cota told him. “Behind it is our stone wine cave where we store our finished product before distribution. Upstairs is the office. Our vineyard manager oversees the harvest, fermentation and field workers. My husband, whom you’ll meet, oversees sales and distribution.”
“How much wine do you produce each year?” he asked, doing his best to get some information out of her during this opportunity.
“Almost ten thousand amphorae per year.”
“Ten thousand!” he exclaimed. This was multiple times anything even the Palace of the Flavians could serve up in a year. “Who drinks it?”
She laughed. “You and me, of course. The bulk of our shipments go to the churches of Asia Minor for communion worship. My husband knows all the numbers, but I doubt he’ll share the particulars with you.”
Cota herself didn’t seem to be in any hurry to introduce him to her husband, and she asked him if there was anything in particular he wanted to see.
“I find it best to simply follow the wine,” he told her.
“Then follow me, Samuel.”
She led him to a great gravel courtyard outside the winery, where men from the fields brought baskets of grapes into one of the two cavernous cave entrances and dumped them into stone treading lagars dug out from the floor of the cavern. Here women were treading the sweet grapes with their feet.
“We call this first or sweet press,” Cota explained.
“The good stuff,” Athanasius quipped.
He watched the juice run off down wide troughs into drains that went into special basins for fermentation deeper into the cave. After the free juice poured off, the women stepped out of the treading lagars, which were now filled with the waste of the grapes called the pomace.
“Mind if I look closer?” he asked Cota.
“Not at all, but do be careful,” she cautioned, although he couldn’t imagine why.
He looked into a lagar that had been filled with red grapes. The pomace was blackish-red grape skins, stems and seeds, which contained most of the tannins and alcohol. The juice from this pomace was the brand bound for Caesar’s palace, he concluded, and then examined a lagar for white wine production. Here the debris was a pale, greenish-brown color, which contained more residual sugars.
“You must save the green stuff for some special dessert wines,” he started to say when the entire tunnel began to shake.
“Step away, Samuel!” Cota shouted, and pulled him back by his tunic as the ceiling seemed to cave in.
For a moment Athanasius thought the whole mountain was collapsing upon them. The rumble was deafening. With amazement Athanasius watched large flat boulders as wide and long as the two main lagars descend from the cavern ceiling from large wooden capstans, pulleys and ropes. Then he saw how they defied gravity: teams of six men each were stationed at the spokes of two great horizontal turnstyles, pushing them in order to control the descent of the boulders until they pressed flat on the lagars. Suddenly a second burst of vast quantities of blood-red and pukish green pomace sprung forth from the lagars toward even larger fermentation pools beyond the first.
Cota laughed as Athanasius caught his breath. “We almost lost you, Samuel, and you haven’t even started yet!”
He nodded at the boulders. “You’ve got screw presses too. These are very rare.”
“So is that,” she said, and he realized she was looking at the Star of David with the Tear of Joy around his neck. She began to fondle it. It must have fallen out of his tunic when he had bent over the lagar. “Did a girl give you that?”
“It’s been in my family forever,” he replied and slipped it back under his tunic.
She looked relieved, then went on. “The cave provides the structure for the mechanisms. The free juice produces our highest-quality wine in the smallest quantities. But the screw press squeezes more juice and profits for good-quality wine in larger quantities. Now watch this, because this might be your job if my husband doesn’t like you.”
The boulders began to quake in the lagars again, and the men at the turnstyles were back at their positions, straining harder than ever to raise the stones like the mythological Sisyphus pushing his great boulder up the mountain only to see it roll back upon him. As soon as the boulders were back in place above the lagars, teams of scrawny young men, some mere boys, jumped into the lagars.
“Clear!” came the shout.
Supervisors pulled back planks that Athanasius hadn’t noticed before—they were stained by countless pomace grindings—to reveal holes at the bottom of the lagars. Then the scrawny sweepers began to push the remaining pomace down the holes.
Athanasius glanced at Cota and bent over the nearest lagar to look down one of the holes. Through it he saw the pomace dropping into vast pools of water in a cavern below.
“Fermentation pits for lora,” he said. “The bad stuff.”
“We make no bad wine, Samuel,” she sniffed. “We give the gift of wine to those who could otherwise not afford it.”
Athanasius now understood. Lora was an inferior wine that was normally given to slaves and common workers. It was simply a mix of leftover pomace and water. Disgusting stuff, recalling the one time he asked a servant to allow him a sip. It could hardly be called wine at all but some pretender that had no flavor.
“Let me guess,” Athanasius told Cota. “I’m looking at the Dovilin brand of communion wine down there. Water soaked in grape skins. That’s how you fill 10,000 amphorae.”
“I like it,” said a voice, and Athanasius turned to see big Brutus looking down at him with a frown.
Athanasius nodded. “My favorite,” he said, and winked at Cota. “I don’t know how the other half takes it so strong.”
“Mistress Cota,” Brutus said, “your father-in-law would like to see you later when you are finished with this one.”
“Well, I’m not,” she told him. “Not yet. But soon. I have to take him to Vibius. Go on.”
Athanasius watched the scowling slave leave and said, “I see Dovilin’s eyes are on everybody here.”
“This way,” she told him as another shift of men from the fields came in with fresh baskets for the presses and the entire process started over again. “One last stop at the Angel’s Vault.”
The Angel’s Vault turned out to be in the second of the two wine caves behind the winery’s façade in the cliffs, and Athanasius realized the two caves formed a V and connected at a guard station with three great vault doors and two armed guards. One door led back to the pits and presses from which they had come. The second door, according to Cota, would lead them to the Angel’s Vault and the commercial storefront of the winery.
“What about this one?” Athanasius asked her, pointing to the third door that opened into a particularly black, narrow and harrowing tunnel.
“That’s the hole to hell, Samuel. I do hope Vibius doesn’t send you down there.”
Athanasius followed Cota through the second tunnel that would lead them back outside through the main winery entrance. Here the walls were lined with amphorae, and Athanasius sensed immediately that this was what he was looking for in this entire mission to Cappadocia.
“They haven’t been sealed yet,” he observed.
“This is the final fermentation before we seal the wine,” she told him. “The freestanding amphorae you see are the reds, which we keep at higher temperatures in the cave. The amphorae that are half-buried are the whites, to keep them cooler.”
Athanasius immediately focused on the freestanding reds, scanning to see any markings or imperial insignias that would indicate they were bound for Caesar’s palace. “So decorative, with all kinds of marks and labels.”