A new addition to the group, Barry, showed up a few minutes before we were supposed to board the bus to Halkidiki the next morning. In an open-collared, apricot-colored polo shirt and with his rolling suitcase beside him, he introduced himself to Izzy and me. Barry was from upstate New York and worked for a company that provided food service to colleges. His flight to Greece had been delayed two days ago. The delay had cascaded a series of contingencies, which resulted in his arrival late last night. Barry was short, squat, with dark, Italian coloring and a heavy East Coast accent. He spoke in the terse, colloquial, innocuous manner of, I decided after we took our rows, a Little League baseball umpire.
The Tsantali Winery was located in Peligros, Halkidiki’s capital, a peninsula sixty-nine kilometers southeast of Thessaloniki. Here we saw copper stills and an unconventional vertical press. The vertical press was a hulking machine of steel and wood designed, we learned, to maximize the “must” (the quantity of juice) that could be derived from the “pumice” (solid grape matter) without compromising quality. Winemaking was always a negotiation between technology and the natural processes that resisted it. If winemakers interfered too much, things could backfire. They’d end up losing valuable extractions crucial to vinification, instead of gaining them. Machinery only helped to a point. Ultimately, one had to defer to the idiosyncrasies of the grape.
Athiri, another new varietal to us, was the first wine we tasted. The managing director who’d taken us around, Angelos, was pleased to hear Izzy’s remark that this wine’s crisp green-pear flavor made it perfect for American drinkers who’d grown tired of the same old Pinot Grigio. Its floralness was also a point of interest to contrast the ubiquitous Italian standard. Izzy next swirled and took a small sip of a blend of Limnio and Cabernet Sauvignon called Metoxi. It had been poured out of the bottle and into a decanter beforehand. “Licorice,” she said. It never failed to impress me how she could detect the flavors and generate similes so rapidly. As soon as she made her proclamation, everyone else could taste what it was she said she found. This was quite the opposite of my experiences as a teacher. More times than I cared to recall, students had looked at me aghast, as though I’d dropped my pants and flashed my Melville, whenever I’d allude, offhandedly, but purposefully, to a flourishing passage in Moby Dick during class.
A couple of varietals later, as Izzy gave the room her notes, Barry knocked over a glass of wine. When he went to pick it up, down came a glass of Dick’s. Barry apologized profusely for the commotion; he hadn’t slept well, he repeated, and was still pretty jetlagged. Izzy had been looking at something in her lap during the interruption. Her BlackBerry.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said. She straightened her back and put the BlackBerry on the table facedown. “Just looking up vertical presses on Wikipedia.”
“Okay,” I said.
In the afternoon, we set out for a two-and-a-half-hour drive to Naoussa, a small town of only forty-five square meters. Naoussa sat off the road linking Veria and Skydra. Farmlands lined our path to the east. To the west, there were forests and the Vermion Mountains.
Izzy slept with her head on my shoulder. This trip had already transformed her mood. She wasn’t as volatile as she’d seemed for a while back home, not as tense, as defensive. She’d been affectionate again after we left Chicago and continued to be as we moved through Greece. I wanted to believe she’d left behind all the thorny parts of our past. But I couldn’t stop thinking about her with her BlackBerry at Tsantali. Her claim she’d been on Wikipedia felt like a lie.
I needed her phone. As I tried to work out a plan to sneak it away from her, we hit a segment of the highway that was littered with potholes. Izzy was still asleep when the rocky stretch of terrain sent a thunderbolt through the bus. Unconsciously, she pulled away from my shoulder and repositioned her head against the glass. Here was my opportunity. Her unguarded bag was between us. I was able to open it and reel out the BlackBerry. I stuck it in my pocket. A few seconds later, I casually brought it out. I feigned surprise, as though thinking, Who’d try to reach me now, here? I openly squinted at the screen and made to take in imaginary information, just as Izzy always did when the device buzzed her with a real e-mail.
I looked first at the sent items. She had been texting Pacer Rosengrant from the winery. Goddamn it. His most recent missive went unanswered. He must have sent it while we were walking or eating, when it would have been too conspicuous for her to respond. I set about sending a reply now. I didn’t know how much this was costing. I wasn’t even sure a text would go through, out here on a country road, where there were likely few, if any, cell towers. I typed, What time is it there? Numbers vibrated back a moment later. It was particularly infuriating he replied so quickly. It was as though her tawdry interlocutor were on call. How could she persist in this behavior, even from here? Was she just humoring me by being amiable and, dare I interpret it, loving? That was the only possible explanation. Either that, or she really was torn between both of us. Then the BlackBerry dispensed, You get to naoussa yet? I returned: On the way. What came next was Forgot 2 tell u Check out Domaine Karydas if u can. Kickass Xinomavro. Super good fruit n structure spicy roasted plum wood smoke coffee notes. Had on BTG for a min @ Palazzo. Was he kidding? Don’t have time, I typed. And I can’t talk right now. This text-messaging thing had really gotten out of control. It had jumped bail in Chicago and was now committing international offenses. Was she updating him from every step of the journey? Where did Izzy think this ceaseless juggling of her past and her present was going to lead her, exactly? At some point, the laws of nature and half-hour television dictated, things were bound to take a turn for the catastrophic.
I erased the dialogue and put the phone back in her bag. Then I closed my eyes and tried to nap off my warm, throbbing drunk. It was starting to turn into a nauseated rumble in my stomach. My esophagus and trachea hadn’t really stopped pulsing and burning all day.
We checked into the Esperides Spa Hotel, situated among the churches and monasteries and ancient tombs. It was a modern resort that had been designed to look rustic. The rooms were clean and brightly colored. Izzy and I showered and changed for dinner. We decided to have a cocktail on the terrace, which overlooked a beautiful verdant countryside beneath the dwindling sunlight.
“You want vodka?” she asked after we sat down. She’d given me the seat that faced the mountains. So I could appreciate the scenery and maybe get inspired, she said.
A server promptly took Izzy’s order. We were the only lounge patrons. “I guess Greeks don’t start drinking this early,” I mused.
Izzy shook her head. “We’re Americans. It’s always five o’clock wherever we are. It’s nice here, though. Without everybody else. Without a tasting to rush to.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “These trips are intense.”
“Why do you think I’ve turned down so many invitations? ‘Come to Canada,’ ‘Come to Argentina,’ ‘Come to Italy and Croatia and Slovenia.’ If I went everywhere I got invited, you’d never see me.”
“It was nice of them to let you have me along this trip.”
“I insisted.”
“Why?”
She looked at me like I’d just asked the stupidest question she’d ever heard. “Why do you think?”
The waiter set our drinks and a small dish of pistachios before us.
“I have an idea why you might have wanted me here at one point, but I don’t know why you would now. It felt like we were getting along again, but—”
“But what?”
“Ask yourself, ‘But what?’”
“I don’t follow.”
“Do you still want to get a separation? Do you still want to break up?”
“I don’t know.” She flipped the clean ashtray in her hands. “Do you?”
“Are you done with Pacer Rosengrant?”
She squinted at her
cava. “Don’t start with me.”
“Why are you texting him?”
Her gaze went stormy and piercing. “Why are you constantly patrolling me?”
I was struck with the vague understanding that it was going to take more than reason to extricate Izzy from the mire. I was going to have to do something, but I didn’t know yet what.
Izzy stepped away to the water closet off of the lobby to refresh her makeup. I drained my vodka and stared out the windows, down the expanse of green vegetation. It seemed to stretch out beyond the resort into infinity. I knew it must have had some kind of end point, even if I couldn’t conceive of it from here. There was always a demarcation where something concluded and something else began. When I tried to commit the panorama to memory, it made me dizzy. I shivered. Suddenly my throat was dry.
When she came back, Izzy noticed right away that her glass was empty. “What happened to my drink?”
“‘I drank it,’” I said. “‘Because it was yours.’”
She wrinkled her forehead in perplexity.
“That’s Hemingway. From The Garden of Eden. When you said . . . well, it came back to me.”
“It’s a beautiful line, Hapworth.”
“You should read the novel.”
“What were you writing down at Tsantali?” she asked then.
“Everything.”
“Do you feel like you’ve learned more about wine since we’ve been here?”
“I do. I’m trying to get as much of it into my brain as I can.”
“There’s probably a restaurant concept in here somewhere.”
I grinned. It was touching how she wanted to help me become something more than just an out-of-work English teacher who followed his famous sommelier wife along on wine trips, made inane comments, and took superfluous notes. She still believed in my potential, even at a point when she had no idea of what she’d end up herself. “I know. They’re everywhere. You know, Izzy, I’m starting to think more and more about developing a wine idea. A real one.”
“Like a wine bar?”
“A Greek wine bar, a restaurant, something like that. I love these wines. You love these wines. We could be a hit.”
She inhaled the clean evening air that breezed our way. “You’d still need to convince investors.”
“Once I’d tell them about all of this, how hard could it be?”
“You’d have to sell more than just Greek wine, you know.”
“I know—but, wait a minute, why?”
“Because nobody knows Greek wine in the States yet. Except for Retsina. And those shitty, dusty, ancient bottles on high shelves at those terrible fake tavernas on Halsted, in Chicago. People admire them and then order a Mythos. To Americans, Greek wine is decoration. And what we’ve had so far here is the total opposite.” She looked almost forlorn delivering this disheartening state of enological affairs.
“You forget about your inimitable way of teaching old Americans new drinks. Isabelle Conway doesn’t follow trends. She starts trends.”
“You really want to open a Greek wine bar?”
“There’s nothing else like it in Chicago. We could have these wines, foods we’ve had here for sale, yogurt strained on the premises. We’d be known for our dolmades and our delicious by-the-glass Xinomavro.”
“I don’t know about a Greek specialty foods shop, too, since, you know, you and I know nothing about Greek food, except how much we like eating it.”
“You’re an amazing cook.”
She shrugged this off. “I can tell you this: I like all this ‘we’ stuff.” She smiled.
“Whatever we did, it would be the only way to do it.”
“That’s sweet, Hapworth.”
“We are married, remember?”
“Yeah,” she said in a dreamy tone. “I do.”
Aboard the bus, we circled the mountain. We climbed up hilly drives at imperiled angles. Then we plunged into town for dinner. We passed gas stations, some boarded up, others operational. We drove by newsstands, a sporting goods store, and an electronics store. There was a sign pointing interested drivers to a sacrifice site. A large power-tool warehouse had a big banner on a windowless side advertising a Mikita circular saw and FAG brand bearings. The latter product name elicited fervent adolescent twittering from the back rows.
We waited outside while George stepped into a small restaurant to announce our arrival. Izzy told Dick, Maddie, and Barry more about Vintage Attraction—their intrigue was boundless—and I watched her. She’d changed clothes again before we left. Now she wore a bright-white blouse with its first three buttons open. She also had on dark jeans and ballet flats on her sockless feet.
George emerged to direct everyone into Manos. Across the room from a polished bar, a long table, covered in a plaid cloth, awaited us beneath low-watt bulbs on spindly cords that dangled from the chandeliers. Some menus lay between the place settings. Nobody except Dick reached for one.
“Just order for us,” Maddie said to George. “We’ve had so much food today, I don’t know if I can think about anything more.”
“Sure,” he said. “Just a couple of things? Small plates, family style?”
Dick thinned his lips. He released the menu he’d taken with a flourish. “I was going to get an entrée. But if nobody else is . . .”
Under the dim lights of the chandeliers, the support branches of which looked like wooden antlers, we ate appetizers. Dick and Izzy talked about the wines we’d tasted earlier.
“So, basically, what we saw today, at Tsantali? I could easily buy the entire vintage for my stores,” he said from his seat at the head of the table. Behind him was a wall of a stone mosaic that resembled the pattern of a giraffe’s skin.
“How many franchises do you have, again?”
“With Corked4Less? By the end of the year, we’ll have two hundred locations in America. Next two years, we’re going international.”
Maddie spread some taramosalata on a piece of bread and ate it without an outward expression of enjoyment. She stared through the windows at some kids skateboarding in front of the restaurant. She’d probably heard this story too many times.
“And so since I can get tremendous discounts straight from the wineries, I can cut out the need for distribution channels, and that’s why we can offer such savings to the consumers. Isabelle, that organic Cabernet we had today. How much would that usually retail?”
Izzy said, “I don’t know, Dick. Depends on the wholesale cost, of course, but assuming good FOB pricing, after you convert the currency from the euro . . . twelve, thirteen dollars a bottle?”
“So, I’d sell it for seven,” Dick said. “That’s our ideal price point, seven to fifteen dollars. Anything over fifteen, our customers don’t want to bother with it.”
“Neither does this customer,” I said.
Dick smiled. “I’m sure with this one you don’t have to buy a lot of your own wine.”
“No, not too much,” I said. “But I appreciate a good deal when I see one.”
“That’s the right way to approach it, I think,” said Dick.
“What’s your next franchise business?” George asked.
“We’re launching a line of self-service tanning bed facilities.”
Here Maddie put down her water glass and turned back to the table. “It’s called Bronze-o-Matic.”
Dick pressed together his lips. “I let her name it.” Maddie bowed her head, and Izzy and I applauded.
“What’s it . . . so, it’s going to be—” Barry began to ask.
“Tanning,” Maddie said. “People will buy prepaid tanning cards at a variety of outlets, supermarkets, Walgreens, and then let themselves into the franchises with their cards, just like at an ATM.”
“And then just get down and close the lid?”
“Pretty much.”
“A bronze mine,” I said.
“Right,” Dick said. He smiled. We clinked our glasses together. “I like this one. He’s quiet, but he’s on the ball.”
Plates began to arrive and circulate the table. From hand to hand went breaded eggplant, salad, horta greens, sausage, broiled lamb chops—surprisingly devoid of fat, compared to their American counterparts—pita, and sautéed mushrooms. There were bowls filled with lemon wedges. The waiter encouraged us to each take several pieces. The restaurant recommended, in keeping with Grecian dining practices, that we squeeze lemon juice over all of the dishes, in order to heighten the flavors. To conclude the meal, an assortment of brown and golden semolina cakes, revani, appeared alongside chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla ice creams. Everybody claimed not to really want dessert. After receiving it anyway, compliments of the house, everyone forked and spooned steadily until it was gone.
On the return drive to the hotel, in the front seat, working beneath a small light, George went over the next day’s itinerary. In the back, Barry tried to fill out postcards when the road wasn’t too bumpy. Maddie, in her own row, listened to her iPod. This allowed Izzy and Dick to sit together and talk about business. A few rows ahead, I stretched out, shut my eyes. I breathed Mike’s billowing closed-window cigarette smoke and pretended to sleep.
“I have the money, I have the stores, but the thing I don’t have is someone who knows what the hell he or she is talking about telling me what wines to stock,” Dick said. “It’s frustrating. I need a sommelier. Do you consult? I know you’re busy with TV and stuff, but do you have colleagues who do that sort of thing?”
“Sure,” Izzy said. “Sommeliers are a diverse bunch. Many are in restaurants, but a good number work for distributors, for wineries, do consulting, speaking, buy for hotels, train restaurant staffs, serve as brand ambassadors, you name it.”
“I think if I had someone just assess the overall Corked4Less central purchasing operation, I’d at least have a good idea if what we’re doing makes sense in the long run, if we’re picking good sellers.”
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