Vintage (32 page)

He whistled as he crossed the courtyard to the kitchen, where he found a package of ground lamb and some lovely tomatoes in the refrigerator. He then checked the cozy kitchen garden that Sylvie kept behind the main house. It was weedy and neglected, but there was a drip irrigation system and several unkempt rosemary bushes. He dug out a few new potatoes and brought it all back to the kitchen, where he blanched, seeded and peeled the tomatoes, then blended them into a puree. He added crushed rosemary, some diced garlic from a basket hanging over the sink and then made another trip to the garden for basil and thyme. The lamb was lean, so he warmed it in olive oil until the color just started to darken, and then he drained it and added it to the puree. There was an unlabeled bottle of Pinot Noir on the counter that he assumed was for cooking (though he drank a full glass and it was delicious), so he added two cups to the puree,
simmered to reduce some of the alcohol, then added the rest on a low flame before walking back down to the village for bread, claiming their very last baguette and a pink meringue to munch on for strength on the way back up the hill.

When Sylvie finally came into the kitchen it had been closer to four hours than two. She had showered and now wore jeans and a clean white T-shirt, and she'd put on simple gold hoop earrings, which was all the elegance she needed. Bruno's spine tingled at the sight of her and he folded the newspaper he'd been reading and stood and bowed.

“It smells fantastic. I'm starving,” she said, looking at the soup and bread, quite pleased.

They carried the meal out to the shaded patio behind the house. They could see the evening light on the vines, the leaves curling in the heat.

“I hope it cools tonight. I'm worried about the acids. If they drop too far and the fruit is cooked, our wines will lose all their structure. Every year it's a touch warmer. It frightens me. We could use a cold spell, as long as there's no hail. If it hails again this year, we're finished.”

“There must be times when a grower feels helpless.”

“You have to be humble and fatalistic to make wine.
This is the year we were given,
you say. But you also have to be stubborn and have an ego to think you can make something good every year. I think that's why most vignerons are half crazy.”

They ate in silence and sat comfortably together until the sun had set completely. She lit an oil lamp in the center of the table while he made coffee, and moths began to dance around the light. As they sipped the coffee she said, “I know why you've come back.”

“Do you?”

“You think you've figured it out?”

“I think so. But I respect your privacy and I'll question you only if it's okay.”

“Are you going to write about it?”

“I haven't decided.”

“It doesn't matter. You can do as you wish. We haven't had any wine yet. Come with me.”

She led him into the courtyard and around the building. The moon had climbed and now cast their shadows across the grass. She veered to the wall and leaned over, pressing a vine leaf between her palms.

“They're breathing again now that it has cooled off a little. Feel.” He followed her lead and pressed a grape leaf between his hands. It felt cool and smooth, alive against his skin, and the leaves were no longer curled as they had been in the heat of the day.

She led him around to the cellar, pausing along the way to wind up a hose. She clicked on the lights inside before securing the door behind them. The air was thick with oak and must, muted and weary in anticipation of harvest, which would bring the sulfurous, yeasty bubbling of fermentation. Bruno wondered what it must be like, being able to breathe this ancient cellar air every day, to wake every morning and gaze out over vineyards. His mother's couch was comfortable, but how was that life? His cubicle at the
Sun-Times
had guaranteed him a regular paycheck, but was it worth the time he spent in that cell? How was all that any different from the life Varushkin lived now? Some live their entire lives inside a great big Butyrka. The magic of food and wine, the well-laden table, the puff of steam as the lid is lifted off a dish of cassoulet, the reflected candlelight in the sparkle of a freshly poured Pinot Noir: these are the things that offer us a
daily glimpse of the wonder that now surrounded Bruno. This was how humans were supposed to live: in fear and humility beneath the threat of hail. In reverence over the cool touch of a breathing leaf in your palm. In the surety that you can pull something wonderful from the soil.

He now understood why Sylvie was so protective of her life. And why she didn't do interviews. She wanted to merely exist, vintage to vintage, and earn enough simply to make it through another year. From the outside, someone would look at her vineyards and the incongruity of the broken Bobard tractor and wonder how her wines could be in such demand. It was no vision of success. Or luxury.

Bruno understood her, and he was no longer angry. For a while he had been. On the plane from Moscow to Paris, he stared out the window and gritted his teeth as he thought about how she had deceived him, sent him on a fool's quest, when the answer had been here all along. But then, the journey is the destination, as all the new age pseudo-Buddhists liked to say. And in truth he had learned a lot on his quest.

“Why didn't you tell me?” he asked as they wended their way around stacks of barrels to the far recesses of the cave.

“Tell you what?”

“About the
vin ordinaire
?”

Sylvie smiled and clicked on a light, illuminating a narrowing corridor sided by barrels that had been aging for a decade or more.

“Ask me anything now.”

“
Vin ordinaire
. Table wine. Your grandfather never bottled Premier Cru '43, right?”

“That's true.”

“Von Speck . . . he stole only the best. The Premier Crus and
up. He left the plonk for the locals. He never took your grandfather's wine, did he?”

“No.”

“Then what did I follow to Naumburg? To Moscow?”

She shrugged. “Who knows . . . maybe it was some other Pommard. Bouchard's, perhaps. Or a Volnay. Gevrey-Chambertin. The Nazis loved their wine, and they took a lot of it.”

“So what happened to yours?”

“My grandfather was outspoken and stubborn. He got into trouble with the occupiers and decided to go into hiding with relatives in the south. Many of the men were hiding, fighting or with
la Résistance
then. The women and children were left behind.”

“So he didn't make any wine that year?”

Sylvie brushed her hand absently against the barrels as they moved farther back in the cellar. “No, he didn't.”

“So what happened, then? Was the fruit just left on the vine? Did someone else take it?”

“My grandmother made the wine that year. With help from her sister.” Sylvie paused by a misshapen wooden door that plugged a natural hole in the side of the cave. “When my grandfather returned, he wouldn't allow the premium designation. He wouldn't allow the family name on the label: his father's name. His grandfather's name. But this wine was made by the women. So it was labeled
vin ordinaire
and sold cheaply.”

“Does that make you angry?”

She shrugged. “That is just how it was back then. Later, when neighbors found out what he'd done with the labeling, they said, ‘How clever of Clement Trevallier, to outsmart the Germans by calling his Premier Cru
vin ordinaire.
' I assume this is the same conclusion you came to.”

“So it wasn't about fooling the Nazis. It was about pride?”

“Mostly. Afterwards he was ashamed—about going into hiding, about leaving the women and children behind, about not giving his wife credit for the vintage. That was when his philosophy changed: all wine was
vin ordinaire
. Everyday wine. His ego and family name became less important. And his wife and family more so.
Great men learn from their mistakes.”

“But when you took over, you stopped making
vin ordinaire
?”

“Yes. When I took over, both of my grandparents were gone. It was time to follow my own vision. I suppose I am more like my grandfather when he was young. I wanted all of the wines made by Trevallier to only be the best. If it is not good, I pour it out, even though it is expensive to do so. Every wine we make will be extraordinary. And from now on, until the name Trevallier passes into memory, all of our wine will be made by a woman.” She smiled.

“What about the wine your grandmother made?”

“It was all consumed years ago. Nobody saves ordinary table wine.”

“Not even the producer?”

Sylvie smiled. “We may have a few bottles lying around somewhere.”

She unlatched the door and led him into a low-ceilinged room with a barrel standing on end, along with two stools. The walls were lined with racks and dusty bottles. A low shelf held clean glasses.

“When I was a girl I used to dare myself to come back here. I thought that this was where the ghosts lived.”

She lit a candle that was stuck in wax to the barrel and took two glasses and gestured for Bruno to have a seat. She pulled a bottle from low on the rack and wiped the dust and mold with
the hem of her shirt. The bottle had no labels or markings of any kind. She took a corkscrew from her pocket and effortlessly pulled the crumbling cork that was a twin to the one that Bruno had carried for so long. The room filled with the aroma of earth and just a hint of ripe fruit. The air felt ancient, and Bruno thought that this was what it must have been like for those adventurers who first opened the tombs of the pharaohs.

She poured, swirled and sniffed.

“This one is still good. Here.”

She poured some for Bruno. He was afraid to touch the glass. He felt weak. His stomach fluttered. He thought he might fall off the stool.

“So it was here the whole time?”

“Yes.”

“What of this?” Bruno held out the cork he'd been carrying for so long.

“My grandfather or father may have given some bottles away over the years. Maybe it is from one of those gifts. Or perhaps it's a fake.”

“Who knows about this?” He gestured to the rack of wines.

“My father did. My grandfather. Of course, my grandmother as well. People tried to guess what happened to that vintage, and we let them. Was it stolen by Hitler himself? Or had my grandfather called it
vin ordinaire
to hide it from the Nazis? We allowed people to wonder.”

“Who else knows the truth?”

“No one. Not Claude or my ex-husband. I'm the only one left. And now there is also you.” She winked at him. “Well, I suppose you want to try some?”

Bruno's hand trembled.

“It's okay. Go ahead. Don't wait too long. Wines this old lose
their magic quickly. Sometimes in minutes. Like life, it's fleeting. Then it truly becomes just everyday wine,” she said.

He smiled and swirled. He sniffed the air above the glass. Tears brimmed in his eyes. He held it to the light a long moment and then sipped.

“How would you describe it?”

“I don't think I can.”

“Sometimes it's fine just to drink it.”

They both sipped in silence. Bruno knew as well as anyone that the pseudo-scientific formulae for evaluating wines were something of a sham. Life isn't as empirical as we all pretend it to be. French wines are extraordinary because they make us think of France, whether we've been there in reality or only in our imaginations. Great wines are about the people we shared them with, the meals we drank them beside and the location where we pulled the cork. Wine tasted from brown paper bags standing next to scorecards in some publisher's office is a practice in absurdity. Bruno sipped again and fought to contain the emotion.

It was extraordinary not only because it was so utterly unlike anything he'd ever tasted in his life, so perfect in its composition, so rich and deep with layered meaning, but also because Bruno knew its story. This wine was a story, a voice that had been calling him from even before he'd stumbled across the cork in Aleksei's locker. It wasn't the story of this mysterious cellar, of an occupying army or of the women who'd brought in that harvest under Nazi occupation. Not the story of the year's worth of weather, or the soils, which had once been the bottom of an ancient sea, then slowly raised to hillsides of millennia to clutch the roots of the breathing vines. The story of the monks who had spent centuries painstakingly crossing and selecting this single cultivar to be grown in this exact spot on the globe.

Or even the story of this strange, beautiful, complex and ordinary woman who sat across from him now.

This wine was none of these, and all of these, because it was Bruno's story. It had led him here, to this place, to be with Sylvie. And because of this, it was perfection captured in a glass.

“What would they write about this?” Sylvie asked. “Would they say it tastes of raspberries, pencil shavings, a hint of chocolate? Maybe they'd make up new words for it, if they were particularly clever. But do you know what I think of, when I drink this? I think of my grandmother. My grandfather was called by some the greatest winemaker of his generation. But my grandmother's wine was even better. Don't you agree, now that you've tried it? And in the end, both of them were humble farmers. Nothing brought them more pleasure than to sit down at a meal with their family. Tell me, what do you think of as you taste this, Mr. Tannenbaum?”

He thought for a long moment, the silence settling down around him.

“I'm thinking of my daughters,” he said, finally.

She smiled. “That's good. Maybe you really do understand more than the others.”

“I'm trying.”

“So, do you have an ending to your story now?”

“Yes, but it's not the ending I expected.”