A beam of red light shone outside my kitchen window as I finished my dinner dishes. I watched it bob up and down as it moved past the rosebushes toward the summerhouse. When Quinn wanted to preserve his night vision he used a red flashlight. It was just after eight o’clock. Early for him.
Of all the surprising discoveries I’d made about my eccentric winemaker, the most unexpected was his passion for astronomy. Before he died, my father gave Quinn permission to bring a telescope to the summerhouse with its panoramic and mostly un-light-polluted view of the night sky from the valley all the way to the Blue Ridge. But Quinn and I had a falling out a while back when I thought he was turning the place into a love nest. In a fit of anger, he’d removed the telescope and his copies of Stardate, a magazine I once thought pertained to online dating.
Maybe he’d brought the telescope back and forgotten our tiff. I pulled on a hooded sweatshirt that had been hanging on the back of a chair and got my cane. My night vision hadn’t adjusted as well as his and I yelped when I got caught on the thorns of one of the rosebushes.
He came out of the summerhouse. “What are you doing here?”
“Impaling myself in the dark. What do think I’m doing here? I came to see what you’re looking at.” I tugged the sleeves of my sweatshirt so they covered my hands. It was cooler than I expected. “Did you bring your telescope?”
In the near darkness his face was darker shadows and planes, his eyes black pools of negative space. “I thought you didn’t want me stargazing out here.”
He hadn’t forgotten the argument.
“That was a misunderstanding and you know it,” I said.
“It’s still at my place,” he said. “Packed up.”
“You could bring it back, if you wanted.”
“Is that so?” he said. “Thanks. I’ll think about it.”
I didn’t like the way he kept staring at me. “If you don’t have your telescope, what made you come here tonight?”
“Wanted a view of the harvest moon. There’s only one each year. Tonight’s the night. Too many trees at my place for a good view.” He walked back to the summerhouse and opened the door. I heard something scraping inside. “Grab that door, will you?”
He hauled one of my mother’s weather-beaten Adirondack chairs outside and positioned it so it looked out over the valley.
“You staying?” he asked. “Or were you just checking up on me?”
“I’ll stay.”
“You don’t need to.”
“I’d like to. Unless you’d rather be alone.”
“Don’t complicate things. I asked, didn’t I?” He went back inside and got another chair.
“There are lots of harvest moons,” I said.
“Nope. There’s only one that’s closest to the autumnal equinox. That’s the real harvest moon.” He set the second chair close to the first. “Have a seat. Moon’s behind that cloud bank. When it moves away, you’ll see it.”
I set my cane down and sat next to him, leaning against the weather-coarsened wood. He pulled a cigar out of his jacket pocket, unwrapped it, and rustled in another pocket for matches. I watched the familiar ritual as his match flared and he bent his head, puffing until the cigar was lit. The tip glowed like a mini-moon and I breathed in the familiar scent of his tobacco.
He sat back as the clouds slowly moved off and the enormous moon, the color of a ripe wheel of Leicester cheese, hung in the sky above our heads.
“It’s gorgeous,” I said.
“Yup.” He stretched his legs out in front of him and crossed them.
“You know in France, they used to care for the grapes according to the phases of the moon,” I said. “Planting, picking, pruning. Maybe we should try it some time.”
“The French also believe it’s bad luck to have women around at harvest.” He looked at me and puffed on the cigar. “I don’t suppose you’d like to try that sometime?”
I tucked my feet under me and wrapped my arms around my knees. “You are such a Neanderthal, you know that?”
He laughed. “I just don’t buy into that crap, that’s all. Give me science any day. Speaking of which, I’ve been thinking about the Cab blend.”
“You think about it nonstop.” But to tell the truth, so did I. Until we got the grapes picked and into the barrels, I’d be as restless and preoccupied as he was.
“Damn lucky for you that I do,” he said. “I want this year to be out of this world. We could screw up everything else, but you know how much rides on this one.”
I didn’t expect him to sound so somber. Most of the time he acted like he had a grace and favor relationship with St. Vincent, the patron saint of winegrowers, who whispered in his ear. But I understood what he meant. Of all the wines we produced, Cabernet Sauvignon was our most valuable—the one whose sales really paid the bills at the vineyard.
“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.”
“Cheaper than a new pump.” I rinsed a beaker and hung it upside down on a rack to drain. “I need a new cell phone. Store’s in Leesburg. Want to go together?”
His eyes narrowed and I blushed. He was staring at me like I’d just invited him on a date. I folded a dishtowel into a neat rectangle and set it on the counter.
“On second thought, you go on ahead,” I said. “I need to go home and take a shower and change first.”
Quinn looked down at his clothes, which were spattered with dull purple blotches, just like mine. We both looked like we’d been shot repeatedly. He stared at me some more and I could tell he was thinking about something other than my clothes.
“You don’t need to change,” he said. “We’ll take the El. Meet me in the parking lot when you’re done here.”
We didn’t talk much on the drive to Leesburg. He dropped me off at the phone store and said he’d pick me up when he’d done his errand. A teenager who looked like he spent most of his time and money at the tattoo parlor was busy transferring my phone number from the old phone to the new one when Quinn showed up carrying a bag from T. W. Perry Hardware.
On the way back to the car I said, “You think we could stop by Jeroboam’s on the way home?”
“Why?”
“I thought maybe I’d ask Jack about the provenance of that Washington bottle.”
The El was so old he had to unlock the doors manually. He unlocked mine and said, “What do you want to do that for? You already said he’d be insulted.”
“I’m curious and I can be diplomatic. I’ll tell him it’s for the catalog.”
“Follow your own advice and forget it.” He looked over at me. “Damn, Lucie. I can hear the gears whirring inside that little brain of yours. You gotta know, don’t you? You’re not going to let it go. Just like a dog with a bone.”
“A girl could get a swelled head from all the nice things you say, you know that?”
“Part of my charm.”
He took Route 15 to Gilberts Corner, then Mosby’s Highway west to Middleburg, instead of the small country roads as I did. As usual he drove too fast, eyes riveted on the road, working a tiny muscle in his jaw that meant he was pondering something. I knew so little about him. An Italian father who abandoned him and his Argentine mother when he was a kid. She’d raised him on her own somewhere in California. He never talked about his parents, or any siblings, either. If he had any.
We parked in an unmetered space on South Liberty near the old magnolia tree in the churchyard. Jeroboam’s was on the corner on East Washington. Washington Street—East and West—had gotten its name from George, who’d visited when he was surveying the region for Lord Fairfax. And here I was more than two centuries later wondering about a bottle of wine that Washington might have drunk if it had ever been delivered to Mount Vernon.
Jack Greenfield bought Jeroboam’s sight unseen a year ago to appease his beautiful wife, the sensational Sunny, because she hated the commute from their home in Georgetown when she rode with the Goose Creek Hunt or visited her many Loudoun County clients for her interior design business. He hired someone to run Salmanazar’s, the D.C. wine store his family owned for sixty years, and called the new, smaller store in Middleburg “Jeroboam’s.” It was an inside wine joke since the biblical names were also the terms for large-sized bottles used for champagne—a Salmanazar being the equivalent of twelve champagne bottles and a Jeroboam holding four champagnes or six bottles of Bordeaux.
In Middleburg, we still said that people who moved here came from “away,” which distinguished them from the locals who’d been born and bred in Loudoun and Fauquier Counties. Technically Jack and Sunny were from away, but they had generously invested time and talent, becoming well known as part of the community in the short time they’d lived here.
Sunny had decorated Jeroboam’s with her customary flair so it resembled a fine English hunting lodge, whose walls happened to be filled with wine bottles. The few empty spaces, including the little stairway that led to a lower-level tasting room, had been turned into an informal art gallery with all of the paintings for sale. Jack was clearing up glasses and bottles in the dark-paneled tasting room when we arrived. He dressed to sell wine like he worked for a Fortune 500 company—bespoke blazer, starched shirt, silk tie, fine wool slacks, and well-polished tasseled loafers. He came around from behind the bar when he saw us.
Usually I got a friendly kiss on the cheek, but Jack took one look at our wine-stained clothes and held back. “You two look like you could use a drink,” he said.
“Don’t mind if we do,” Quinn said. “What’s cookin’, Jack?”
“Plenty of things are cooking.” He walked back to the bar.
Jack was no nonsense, with a strong face and silver hair, stylishly combed back from a high forehead. Jet-black eyebrows that slanted downward toward the bridge of his nose gave him the look of an erudite devil.
“My esteemed business partner has gone to the airport to pick up his latest girlfriend.” The eyebrows arched with the resigned look of a parent lamenting a child’s behavior. “Sunny and I’ve decided that Shane needs a wife. Too much time being the playboy. Left me here to handle a tasting for a temperamental caterer handling a wedding reception in Upperville next spring. Couldn’t make up her mind about anything.”
“That’s women for you,” Quinn said. I elbowed him.
Jack set out two glasses. “Try this Cab from a vineyard near Charlottesville. Give it a moment to open.”
I drank my wine. “Lovely. Good nose, nice long finish. I like the pepper.”
“A bit young for me,” Quinn said.
“He’s such a critic when he’s thinking about our blend,” I said. “Ignore him.”
Jack smiled. “So what’s cooking with you?”
Quinn concentrated on his nice, young wine. He wasn’t going to help me ask about the Margaux.
“I was hoping you could tell us more about the provenance of the Washington bottle,” I said. “Ryan’s writing the notes for the auction catalog and that bottle is now the star of the show.”
“I know it is,” Jack said. “I’ve been getting calls from all over the world. People want to know if I’ve got another bottle, or even if they can buy a case.” He tapped his forehead with his index finger. “You wonder, sometimes.”
“Not me,” Quinn said. “We get people who want to know if we put real apples in the Riesling when we say it tastes like apple. Or how much pepper we put in the Pinot when we talk about the peppery taste. Do we grind it or put in whole peppercorns?”
Jack laughed. “Good thing you don’t tell them it tastes like leather.”
“So how did it come into your possession?” I asked. We’d veered away from the Margaux.
With some difficulty, he recorked the wine we’d just tasted. Quinn and I both noticed.
Jack looked rueful. “Arthritis acting up again. Don’t get old. To answer your question, Lucie, my family was in the wine trade in Germany from the mid-1700s until just after the Second World War. Then my father moved here and started again in America. In Germany we used to have close ties to every major producer in Europe, especially the French. I found the bottle in the cave at my family’s old warehouse in Freiburg after my father passed away. Someone could have given it to us, or it could have been there for a century.”
“Your father never mentioned that Bordeaux to you?” I asked. “Ever?”
“He did not. When I found it, it was not in good condition which makes me suspect that we acquired it after a previous owner kept it poorly cellared. Or else it was badly transported. Possibly both. I told you it’s probably vinegar by now. But I know you will get a lot of money for it. Some people will pay a small fortune for the thrill of owning a wine once destined for George Washington.”
The last line sounded like a mild rebuke. It was Quinn’s turn to do the elbowing. “We know that, Jack,” he said. “And we’re grateful for your donation. It was extremely generous of you, right, Lucie?”
“It was,” I said. “But if you think of anything between now and the auction—”
“My dear, I’ve already told you everything.” He folded his arms across his chest. “Everything.”
“We should be going,” Quinn said. “Thanks for the wine.”
When we got outside Quinn said, “You can thank me now for saving your bacon. He was getting pretty pissed at you playing Spanish Inquisitor with him. If you’d pushed any harder I bet you he would have asked you to return the bottle.”
“I just asked where it came from. That’s all.”
“He didn’t like it.”
“I know,” I said. “I wonder why.”
“Don’t go there, Lucie. I mean it.”
A gunmetal-colored Porsche pulled up and parked behind Quinn’s El Camino. “That’s Shane,” I said, “and his new friend.”
We watched him help a stunning brunette from the car. “She’s lovely,” I said.
“Goddamn.” Quinn sucked in his breath. “What the hell is she doing here?”
“You know her?” I asked.
The raw pain in his voice gave away he not only knew her, but she’d broken his heart when he did.
“Yes,” he said, “she’s my wife.”