The Merlot Murders (13 page)

The end of harvest could be anywhere from six to eight weeks away, depending on the ripening of the different varietals of grapes. We’d know each other pretty well by then. There would be days when we’d be working together practically around the clock.

He looked sideways at me. “I’m not kidding.”

“Me, either.”

He banked the Gator hard to the right and headed down an aisle of Chardonnay. I held on to the edges of my seat again as we now were driving along the contours of a steep slope. The vines were planted in rows eight feet apart, just wide enough for the Gator or our tractor to navigate. We puttered slowly down the aisle, examining the heavy clusters of translucent green-gold grapes.

I had forgotten how churchlike the vineyard was, silent but for the cicadas’ song, muted by the dense canopy of vines, and the soporific buzzing of honeybees drunk on fermenting grapes. Every so often a crow cawed, and I saw the shadow of its wingspan as it wheeled and turned above us.

It was probably at least the tenth time someone had looked over these vines since the last harvest. Pruning, spraying for pests, tending the trellises, overcropping if there were too many buds, and general fretting over the state of the grapes and the date to harvest were all reasons warranting a visit. Quinn shut off the motor, climbed out of the Gator, and clipped a cluster of grapes with the pruning shears. I joined him after retrieving my cane.

Grapes used in wine growing are smaller than table grapes and densely packed together in bunches. They’re also much sweeter because it’s the sugar that makes the alcohol. Quinn ate a few from the bunch he’d picked and gave me the rest. Although the drought was devastating for crops, gardens, and livestock, it was a blessing for a vineyard since the parched conditions meant the vines worked harder to find water, adding flavor and complexity found in the deeper mineral-rich soil. The longer they hung on the vine once the ripening process, or
véraison,
began, the richer and fuller the wine and the higher the alcohol content.

Unfortunately
véraison
didn’t last forever. At temperatures over ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit, the grapes shut down and stopped ripening all together. Today it was well over one hundred. I looked at Quinn, who was frowning as he chewed. It would be his call when we harvested, a nerve-wracking decision somewhere between a crap shoot and a matter of scientific judgment.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“Let’s test Brix.”

He got the refractometer, a beaker, and a small piece of equipment that looked like a garlic press. Brix measured sugar content of the grapes, probably the most important factor in deciding when they were ready to pick. He crushed several grapes until a straw-colored liquid dripped into a beaker. Dozens of tiny black flies swarmed around us, coating the hood of the Gator like an ink spill. Yellow jackets, excited by the newly released sugar liquid, dive-bombed us and strafed the vines.

“These grapes have had plenty of hang time,” Quinn said swatting a bee, as he swirled juice in the flask. “I don’t think we ought to leave it any later than the day after tomorrow to harvest.”

He poured a few drops onto the refractometer and he closed the top. Then he pointed it at the horizon and looked through the eyepiece.

“Read that,” he said, handing it to me. I squinted toward the light.

“Twenty point eight. Or point six.”

“That’s what I got.” He shook his head. “If this heat keeps up, it could go to twenty-two in the next day or so. It’ll be too high for a Virginia Chardonnay. You don’t have the sunshine California does. Out there we got too much sugar to deal with. I prefer a wine on the drier side like you get here.”

“What if Bobby still has us shut out of the winery?” I swiped at more buzzing insects.

“I’m working on it.” He pulled a pair of half-glasses from the pocket of his Hawaiian shirt and put them on. I watched while he did some calculations, then I got the two bottles of cold water I’d taken from the refrigerator. They were already tepid. I handed one to him and opened the other for myself.

“You got any idea where the root stock for these vines came from?” he asked. “And when they were put in?”

“I think these might have been put in when the vineyard was a few years old—but I’m not sure.” I splashed water on the back of my neck and face. “Isn’t that information in Jacques’s files?”

“If it was, it isn’t anymore. Somebody’s been through them. They’re—well, I guess you’d call it, incomplete.”

He meant Leland. “My mother kept her own garden journals. Not just what was planted here, but also the flower and vegetable gardens, too. She was very meticulous. I’ll have a look.”

“That’d be good.”

He stuffed his glasses back in his shirt pocket and squatted down, cutting another bunch of grapes from a different vine. “Damnit. Damn crows. And deer.” There were empty spots on several vines along the row where the grapes had been stripped down to the stems.

“Why didn’t you put out the owls?” I asked. My mother had a huge collection of owl statues she put along the fences that surrounded the vineyard. They frightened the birds off. Sort of.”

“Statues? I didn’t know about them. Where are they?”

“The smokehouse. I’m surprised Hector didn’t remember.”

“We’d taken to shooting them. The crows, I mean. Until recently.” He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t have to. “Let’s get some samples from other parts of the block. I’ll do TA and pH back at the house to be sure, but I don’t think it’s going to change anything about when we pick.”

TA is titratable acidity and is a measure of the total acid in the grape juice—pH is sort of related to titratable acidity and is the third important component for determining ripeness. If the pH is too high, the grapes could be overripe. The ideal time to harvest is when there’s a good balance between the sweetness and the acidity in the wine, and that could change in the space of a day.

He started the Gator. “I had a call from Elvis Harmon. Seems our neighbor lost a calf,” he said. “Got through a hole in the electric fence. I promised we’d keep an eye out for it.”

“If it’s been too long the foxes probably got it, poor thing.”

“Or the coyotes.”

“We don’t have coyotes in Virginia.”

“They’re moving into the area. We’ve got coyotes, honey.”

He clipped three more bunches of grapes from other vines in the Chardonnay block, then we headed out into an open field toward the larger of our two apple orchards. Quinn kicked the Gator into third gear and we roared bumpily across the hard-packed terrain.

He slowed down as we came to the orchard with its uneven rows of trees, as pleasantly untidy as the vines were orderly and well trained. Apple-picking time began in September and stretched into October, coinciding with the harvest of our reds. A few men from the vineyard crew were sent to the orchard to pick and the apples were made into sparkling cider.

My mother, like Jefferson, believed in experimenting in the garden, and the orchards had been no exception. We had at least a half dozen kinds of apples—the usual Jonathans, Winesaps, and Red Delicious, but also the more exotic Ginger Golds, Cox’s Orange Pippin, and Jefferson’s own favorite, the Esopus Spitzenburg, which despite its homely name, tasted sweetly and smelled of orange blossoms.

We passed the dry-stacked stone wall at the end of the orchard and drove down an allée of cherry trees my mother had planted as seedlings. My favorite time of year to come to this part of the vineyard was spring, when the sprays of pale pink blooms made it look as though the tree branches were covered in a lace curtain. Some years the blossoms didn’t last long and on windy days there would be a pink blizzard that stripped the trees and left a carpet of petals on the ground.

“When did you start working here?” I asked Quinn.

He smiled. “In time to see these in bloom. They were real pretty. I like dogwoods.”

“They’re cherry trees. You’re in George Washington’s backyard.”

“I thought they were dogwoods.”

“We’ve got dogwoods, too. There’s a grove by the Merlot block. My French mother was very patriotic. It’s our state tree.”

“Ah,” he said. “The Merlot block.”

“That’s where Leland…?”

“Yup.”

“I’d like to see it, please.”

He swung around and we drove back in the direction we’d come from. The Merlot block was nearest to the road, not far from where Sycamore Lane split into a “Y” behind Quinn’s and Hector’s houses. We drove by the dairy barn and the dogwood grove without speaking, but I saw him studying the trees. After a moment he stopped at a post marked “A46, R4” and turned off the motor. All vineyards have a numbering system so it’s possible to keep precise track of the location of a trellis needing repairs, a section of vines with yellowed leaves, or so we’d know where the workers had left off pruning for the day.

There was a small rosebush at the end of the row. It appeared recently planted, and it wasn’t doing well in the heat. There were no blooms.

“Here?” I asked.

“Not right here. In the middle of the row.” He climbed off the Gator and I followed. He wanted to walk, not drive.

Here the rows were about as long as football fields, with the vines planted about three feet apart. We got to the spot and Quinn knelt down, pointing to a section of trellis. “That’s where the vine came down and we had to fix the wires and put in a new post.”

I leaned on my cane and knelt next to him, touching two of the frayed red hay bailing ties on the bottom wire where the vines had broken away. You couldn’t tell anything anymore, except for the newness of the post, which would weather after a couple of seasons. Then there’d be nothing left to physically mark the place where Leland had died.

“Who planted that rosebush?”

“Hector’s wife.”

“I’ll have to thank her.”

“That’d be nice. Hey, are you all right?”

I nodded.

“My old man took off and left my mother before I was born.” He reached over and moved away the canopy of leaves to reveal clusters of Merlot grapes. We were weeks away from picking them, probably not until some time in early October. “I never knew him.”

The sandy loam soil hadn’t compacted yet into concrete where they’d fixed the post and trellis. I picked up a handful and let it run through my fingers. Leland had been around, but I hadn’t really known my father, either.

“Eli said…” I paused.

“Yes?”

“He said there was a lot of blood. Where…?”

He looked uneasy. “There was. I wasn’t sure what to do about it, so I brought one of the coolers and poured water everywhere until it was gone. Kind of returning him to the land, if you know what I mean. It seemed okay, when I thought of it that way.”

“Thank you. That was very thoughtful.”

“You know what was strange?”

“What?”

“I found a bullet here when I did it. I thought it might have been…well, it was old. Really old. It must have been there for years.”

“It could have been from the Civil War,” I said. “We find things all the time. Bullets. Pottery. Even a belt buckle, once, from a Confederate soldier.”

He was silent, then he stood and held out his hand to me. I took it and he pulled me up. “Are you okay?”

“I think so.”

When we got back to the Gator, I poured the rest of my water bottle on Serafina’s rosebush.

He started the motor. “You still want to see those new sites?”

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s go look at the future.”

His mouth curved in a small smile, but he didn’t say anything as he swung around and we drove away.

Highland House is set back more than a mile from Atoka Road, the main road, so much of our vineyard is actually in front of the house, though it’s not evident because we’ve got so much land. My mother and Jacques had planted only twenty-five of our five hundred acres in vines, yielding about five thousand cases of wine a year. In California, twenty-five acres is nothing, but in Virginia it’s a decent-sized vineyard.

“How many more acres were you thinking of planting?” I asked.

“Ultimately I was figuring on seventy-five. Fifteen thousand cases. I also think we don’t have to plant only French grapes.”

That would catapult us into the big leagues. It would also cost us a fortune. “You’re very ambitious.”

“We’d do it in stages.”

“We’ll have to.” It takes at least three years before a vine will yield fruit that can be used for making wine, real quality grapes, meaning there are three years of up-front costs before there’s a return on the investment.

Long ago my mother had cross-stitched a quote of Thomas Jefferson’s she liked that she’d framed and hung in her office. It read, “Wine being among the earliest luxuries in which we indulge ourselves, it is desirable it should be made here and we have every soil, aspect, and climate of the best wine countries.” Though Jefferson had tried for years to grow grapes at Monticello and encouraged a wine-making industry in Virginia, it had never happened during his lifetime. Now, sitting next to Quinn, I thought about the possibilities and promise of what could be, that here we
did
have the soil, aspect, and climate to plant vines that could yield world-class wines. Every reason to hope that we could do something extraordinary.