The Chardonnay Charade (5 page)

“We really don’t have the manpower or the equipment to cover two locations this time around without the helicopter. Those vines need to be replaced, anyway,” Quinn had said. “They’re not producing much anymore. If we lose the fruit, then so be it. I know we killed ourselves to save it the night before, but what are you gonna do?”

I pulled off Sycamore Lane onto the north service road. In the distance, the vines glittered and sparkled. It would have been beautiful if it hadn’t been frost. I downshifted and stopped next to a row marker, cutting the engine.

For a long moment we stared silently out the window at the frost-covered posts and vines. “Hector’s right,” he said. “This is work for someone young. It’s backbreaking, you know that.”

“Maybe we can keep him on somehow—”

He cut me off harshly. “Oh, for God’s sake. What is it about you Virginia folks, anyway? You’re always living on your memories. Mosby…the damn Civil War…you talk about that stuff like it happened yesterday.”

“We do
not
—”

He was in no mood to listen. “You do so. Hell, half the Romeos spend their weekends parading around in Civil War uniforms reenacting the battles on the same damned battlegrounds. I hate to break it to you, but you
lost.
The South lost. Why do you have to go over and over and over it, like picking at a scab?”

Either his passion or our body heat was starting to steam up the car windows. He rubbed a small circle in his window with the side of his fist and said without looking at me, “Let Hector go, Lucie. You gotta write your own chapter. Everyone else had their day. Now it’s your turn. You changed your house after the fire. Now it’s time to change the vineyard. It doesn’t have to be preserved as a shrine to your mother.”

As speeches go, it was a long one for him, but clearly something that had been festering. With the clinical precision of a surgeon he had just cut open my life to expose my family’s proud heritage like it was dead tissue that needed removing. Unlike me, he’d come to Virginia to forget his past. I often thought he was trying to shed his memories as a snake sheds a skin. Mine made me who I was. Eli was right that we hadn’t always had an easy time of it after our mother’s death, dealing with Leland’s gambling habits and his errant ways. But I couldn’t stay on at the vineyard without finding a way to fuse the past and present together.

“What you don’t understand about me…about Virginia…the South,” I said, “is that we aren’t mourning the past, we’re honoring it. You make it sound like I’ve got cobwebs in my hair and roots growing from my feet. It’s not like that at all. If you’re a Southerner you’re not talking about geography. You’re talking about a way of life. We’re polite, we respect our elders, our families are important. We have values and traditions.”

“Yeah, well, I have those things, too,” he retorted. “But it doesn’t stop me from moving ahead. I want to do things differently. Break some rules. Experiment. I can’t do it if you’re going to stay mired in keeping everything as it was in your mother’s time.”

“Do we have to have this conversation now?” I asked. “I’m exhausted and filthy. I need a shower and my bed. Why don’t we continue it some other time, okay?”

He shrugged. “Sure. And no point getting out of the car, either. Look.” He pointed to grape clusters, lost to the freeze, that hung limp and shriveled on the vine.

“We saved what we could,” I said. “That has to be good enough.”

I dropped him back at the vineyard parking lot by his El Camino. “See you in the morning,” he said, then smiled faintly. “God, I’m beat. See you whenever.”

“Thanks for everything,” I said.

He reached out and swiped my sooty cheek with a sooty finger. “I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he said. “You look good in black. Suits you.”

“Very funny.”

I had almost fallen asleep when I realized that perhaps the remark about me wearing black had only been half joking. It was the color of funerals, of death, and of the past. The perfect color for someone who clung to old memories and couldn’t let go.

For the second day in a row I woke up late. Though I’d washed my hair twice and stood under the shower for at least half an hour before going to bed, when I smelled my pillow it stank of smoke. Another shower still didn’t remove the tarry grime from under my fingernails. I gave up and got dressed. What I really needed was coffee and something to eat.

Through the open door to Mia’s room I saw tangled bedsheets and clothes flung everywhere. I’d never heard her come in nor get up, but her purse was on her dresser, so she was still home. I found her in the kitchen, sitting in one of the ladder-back chairs at the old pine table our mother had brought from France after she and Leland were married. Dressed in a gray T-shirt that ended midthigh, my sister’s head was bent over a coffee mug in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Her long blond hair screened her face and she didn’t look up at the sound of my cane tapping on the tile floor.

“Hey, when did you get in?” I asked. And when had she started smoking again?

Mia raised her head and for a split second it was Leland’s eyes looking at me, wary and defensive, the haunted, wasted look he’d worn the mornings after he’d had too many Scotches on poker night with the Romeos.

“You’re hung over,” I said, then wished I hadn’t. All I’d done was antagonize her. But seeing her eyes, dark and hooded like two bruises, shocked me the same as if someone actually had hit her. I knew she drank at college like all kids did, and she certainly had access to alcohol at home. She looked like she’d tied one on in a big way last night. I stared again at her eyes. It wasn’t the first time, either.

“No, I’m not.”

I sat down across from her, hooking my cane on the back of another chair. “How much did you drink?”

She sucked hard on her cigarette. “A few beers.”

“Yeah, and I’m going to run the Marine Corps Marathon. Did you drive home drunk?”

She exhaled smoke out of the side of her mouth and stubbed the cigarette in the ashtray. “Will you lay off, for God’s sake? What business is it of yours what I do?”

“You’re my sister.”

She shoved her chair back and stood up. “When did that ever matter?”

I had set that up perfectly. “I’m worried about you. You’re underage. If you get caught—” I sounded too defensive.

“I can vote and join the army and get married. So I’m not legal to drink. Big goddam deal. I will be, in a few months.”

Mia had been fourteen the day she went riding with our mother when Orion, Mom’s horse, threw her as they took a jump over one of the many dry-stacked stone walls that ringed the perimeter of the farm. Mercifully she didn’t suffer long, dying later that day of internal injuries. Mia never spoke about what happened, nor explained why my mother, good enough to qualify as an alternate to France’s Olympic equestrian team, had stumbled over a hurdle so low anyone could have stepped over it without breaking stride. I always wondered if they’d been quarreling and Mom was distracted when it happened. Even back then, Mia had been headstrong and temperamental.

After Mom’s death it was as if something came unmoored inside my sister or she lost any compass she’d once possessed, because she seemed dead set on taking the swiftest passage down the road to hell, without the good intentions. She had always possessed the stunning good looks and the waiflike fragility of a runway model and, as a little girl, her gossamer hair and angelic features had turned heads. Sometime during her short life, though, she’d managed to acquire the sulky, jaded apathy of an old soul who has seen it all before. It was that bored vulnerability that attracted her to the wrong people, and vice versa. The guys she dated ran the bad boy gamut from A to Z. They always had cars that were hot and fast—and that about summed up the boyfriends, too.

“You better be careful,” I said.

“Butt out of my business.”

The grooves of our arguments were so deeply etched over the years they had become ruts we could no longer climb out of, even if we wanted to. It would end as it always did, with her storming out of the room after we shouted at each other. If there was any way to reach her or change things, I no longer knew what it was.

“Look,” I said, more quietly, “I did the same thing when I was your age, so it’s not that. But I’m worried about you. Don’t get into binge drinking. That’s really bad news. Plus if you get caught trying to buy stuff—”

“I won’t get caught. Nobody else is underage. Abby’s twenty-one already, so it’s perfectly legal for her to buy booze.”

“Abby?”

“Lang.”

“You’re hanging around drinking with Senator Lang’s daughter?”

“Where’ve you been, Lucie? We’re in the same sorority. We live in the same house. Don’t you listen to anything I say?”

“I do. I just forgot.”

“I gotta go.” She dumped her coffee in the sink. “Abby’s coming for me.”

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know. Brad and them are deciding.” She scooped up the pack of cigarettes and a book of matches. “We’ll figure it out.”

I watched her slide the matches inside the plastic wrapping. “Who’s ‘Brad and them’?”

She stood in front of me, her long tanned legs crossed over each other, arms folded, looking remote and unreachable as a stranger. “Abby’s boyfriend. And some friend of his.”

“Promise me you’ll watch it. Don’t get drunk again.”

“Lucie,” she said, “leave me alone. I know what I’m doing. I’ll see you sometime.”

“Are you coming home tonight?”

“I don’t know.” She fiddled with a strand of hair, twirling it around one finger. “I might sleep at Abby’s. I don’t like sleeping here ever since Georgia—” She didn’t finish the sentence.

“Whoever killed Georgia probably knew her, Mia,” I said. “There’s not some killer on the loose stalking women in their homes.”

“How can you be sure? How do you know it wasn’t, like, random or something?”

“The police don’t think it was. Look, call me and let me know what you’re doing later. Just so I know you’re all right.”

“Let’s just leave it that no news is good news, okay? I’ll call you if there’s a problem. Otherwise, you should figure that everything’s fine.”

She left the room and I sat down again at the pine table. At least this time we hadn’t ended the conversation shouting at each other, but everything was a long way from fine.

Siri Randstad phoned while I was fixing bacon and eggs. “Can I ask a favor, Lucie?”

“Anything.”

“I’m driving to Dulles this afternoon to pick up a friend of Ross’s who’s coming in for the…uh, for Georgia’s funeral. Could you come over and stay here while I’m at the airport?”

“Sure,” I said, surprised. “Are you worried about Ross being alone?”

“Good Lord! I don’t think he’s suicidal, if that’s what you mean. He’s just so bereft that I think it would be best if he had company.”

“I’ll come,” I said. “What time?”

“Mick’s plane gets in from Miami around four-thirty,” she said. “So I’ll probably leave here at three-thirty.”

“You’ll be stuck in rush-hour traffic on the way back. You won’t get to Middleburg until well past six. What if I pick up a few things and fix dinner for everyone?”

She sounded relieved. “That would be great. The past two nights we got Chinese takeout. I’m up to here with moo goo gai pan.”

“I’ll see you when you get back from the airport.”

Before I went to the grocery store, I stopped off at the winery to check in with Quinn. The design for the compound, which was based around an ivy-covered villa, had come from a sketch my mother had done. She’d hired an architect who added the semi-underground barrel room, connecting the two buildings by a horseshoe-shaped courtyard with a porticoed loggia and graceful arched stone entrance. A large tasting room and our offices were located in the villa; we made and stored wine in the barrel room. The place still looked much as it had when my mother was alive, except the trees and bushes she’d planted twenty years ago were now fully mature and the ivy that branched gracefully over the windows was full and thick. I parked my car in the gravel parking lot alongside Quinn’s El Camino.

Even after all these years, I still sensed my mother’s spirit every time I opened the front door to the villa. Across the room, late afternoon sunshine streamed in through four large sets of French doors that opened onto a cantilevered deck and a view of braided hills covered in vines. The sunlight made gold stripes on the tile floor and picked out some of the colored stones in the grapevine mosaic on the front of the bar so they glowed like jewels. Someone had left a pretty bouquet of red roses on the carved oak table we used for wine tastings. Sera, no doubt. She must have cut the flowers from her garden to keep them from freezing.

Quinn and I had our offices off a small wine library that adjoined the tasting room. The wrought-iron door that led to the library had been one of my mother’s treasured finds from an architectural salvage shop. The library itself had evolved from our previous winemaker’s interest in Virginia’s four-hundred-year effort to develop a wine industry, dating from the Jamestown settlement. At first Jacques left the books he’d read scattered throughout the villa so visitors could read or borrow them. But when the piles grew too high, my practical mother had bookshelves built in the alcove, adding two leather barrel chairs and a reading lamp on an old wine cask.

Beyond the library, a short photo-lined corridor led to the offices and a back door to a small kitchenette. I walked by the vineyard’s lone award—the Governor’s Cup, won twelve years ago by my mother and Jacques. If Quinn and I agreed on anything, it was our determination that one day this wall would be covered from floor to ceiling with awards.

I found him bouncing a tennis ball off a wall in his office.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “Besides making scuff marks on that wall.” When it had been Jacques’s office, the room had looked like a small museum. Now it reminded me of a locker room.

“I’m not making scuff marks. I’m thinking.”

“About what?”

“The Chardonnay. It’s driving me nuts. I’m going back to the lab to do some more blending. Want to come?”

“
More
blending? There won’t be anything left to bottle if you keep experimenting. I thought we agreed on that sample last week.”

He made a face. “Nah. Too fruity. I’ve got some new ideas.”

Last year at harvest we put some of our Chardonnay into oak barrels and left the rest in stainless-steel tanks. Barrel-fermented wine gains an added complexity from the taste of the oak—like adding spice to a sauce—though too much oak will overwhelm, or even dominate, the flavor. On the other hand, wine fermented in refrigerated steel tanks tastes fruitier and brighter. What he was trying to do now was figure out the ratio of oak and steel that would produce a wine we both liked. From this point on—now that the fermentation process had ended—everything we did was about taste and aroma. And the only way to get the perfect blend that suited us was to experiment, tasting the results.

“Look, you know in Virginia we don’t like it too oaked or too sweet,” I said. “So I hope that’s not what you’ve got in mind. I’m not trying to rush you, but don’t you think we’d better get it bottled soon? We can’t afford any spoilage, especially after losing the grapes from the old vines last night.”

“We
won’t
have any spoilage,” he said, “so stop worrying. And I’m still going to do some more sampling.”

“Well, use the two-hundred-fifty mil beakers, then. Surely you don’t need to make a half liter of everything you try.”

“You know, Dom Pérignon used to start blending before the grapes were even pressed. Grapes, not juice. He got ’em from everywhere, too. Different blocks. Other vineyards. So it wasn’t the
goût du terroir
that made his wines world-class. It was the grapes themselves. I’ll bet the Benedictine abbot at Hautvillers didn’t jerk a knot in his chain when he needed more time for blending.”

The
goût du terroir
literally means “the taste of the land” and it is that indefinable
x
factor that gives a wine its distinct taste. But Quinn was right. Dom Pérignon knew some magic the rest of us hadn’t figured out. And he used his own rule book.

I reached out with the hooked end of my cane and swatted at his tennis ball as it sailed past me. The cane connected with the ball and sent it back at him so it hit his arm and bounced under his desk. He grinned and ducked to look for it.

“My mother told me that as a bedtime story,” I said. “Dom Pérignon also had a very delicate palate. All he ate was cheese and fruit. He didn’t even drink. You still need to use the two-hundred-fifty mil beakers or we’ll have nothing left.”

“Why don’t I get those little mouthwash cups the dentist uses? They’re even smaller. Man, you are really tight with a buck, you know that?” He looked disgusted and held up a sheaf of papers. “The order for the new rootstock. I need a certified check for fifty percent so they’ll ship it. We ought to start planting next week.”

“We’ve got to get the tarps off the new fields first.”

“It’s done. Crew took care of it after lunch. Tomorrow they’re going to clean up those steel belts from the tires when we’re sure they’re good and cold.”