by Ellen Crosby
“You were eavesdropping!”
“Honey, they could hear you two hollering clear out to Upperville. That was some fight you and Eli had.” He came over to the table and set down a plate with his oversized sandwich on it. It drooped off the edges. “Is that homemade jam? What kind is it?”
“Gooseberry. It doesn’t go well with ketchup,” I said, coldly. “And my conversation with Eli was none of your business. Don’t you have any respect for people’s privacy?”
“If you want to fight in private, go inside and shut the door. You were outside, bellowing.” He sat down across from me and picked up the jar of jam, staring at the label.
“The tenant cottage where you live is nowhere near this house.”
He set the jar down. “I asked your father if it would be okay to use that abandoned summerhouse you’ve got if I repaired the places where the wood’s rotted, and he said it was fine by him. I had no intention of listening in on you and Eli, but it happened I was there when you two started yelling like a couple of banshees.”
“We were not yelling like banshees and if you had any decency, you would have said something so we would have known you were there.”
“It didn’t seem like a good idea,” he snapped. “I’m a winemaker, not a social worker.” He picked up his sandwich and studied it.
“Why are you here?”
“I’m hungry.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
“I’m not a mind reader, either.”
“The vineyard. This vineyard. Why did you leave California for Virginia?”
He bit into the sandwich and began chewing placidly, staring into my eyes. He swallowed and said, finally, “Why wouldn’t I? I like the pioneering spirit you Virginia folks have got. I’d like to settle down here, maybe someday buy some land and run my own place. As for this place, it’s a good vineyard. It has potential. You’ve got a lot of acreage you ought to be planting out. There’s some new varietals I think we ought to be trying. I know your former vintner stuck with vitis vinifera, but those grapes aren’t the be-all and end-all. I’ve sent off some soil samples to Virginia Tech and the results are pretty good.”
“They are?”
He took another hearty bite. Ketchup dripped down his chin. He wiped it with the back of his hand. I got up and opened the pantry door and took out a bag of paper napkins. I slapped one down next to him. He looked at it, then went back to eating.
“Mmpfh,” he said. “Thizis bery dub beat.”
“You don’t say.”
He finished chewing and switched back to English. “I was thinking of planting a few acres of hybrids like Vidal, Seyval, or Chambourcin. Maybe even try Norton since it’s a native Virginia grape. I’d like to do some experimenting with blending wines, too, not just the standard stuff you’ve been doing. Use a little creativity for a change.”
Vitis vinifera are the grapes Noah planted after the Flood. These were the seeds found with the mummies of the pharaohs in the pyramids in Egypt, the noble grapes that make some of the world’s most fabled wines like Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir, or Chardonnay—all of which we grew at the vineyard.
Maybe Jacques had been a bit of a purist, just keeping us in top-drawer French wines, but in his defense, Virginia’s climate is a lot like Bordeaux where he came from and those were the vines he knew best. Still, Quinn was right. Maybe we should try something new.
I ignored the implied jab at Jacques’s abilities as a winemaker and said neutrally, “Where were you thinking of doing this?”
“I’ll show you,” he said. “Come on.”
“Aren’t you going to finish your breakfast?”
“I’ll take it with me.” He held out half the sandwich. “Want a bite?”
“No, not really.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing.” He wrapped the napkin around it. “I brought the Gator over here. My car wouldn’t start this morning. I’ll get the field test stuff in the dining room and meet you outside in a minute.”
He left and I cleaned up. Then I got two bottles of water from the refrigerator and retrieved Eli’s old New York Mets cap from the floor of the front hall closet. The sun would boil us like lobsters out in the fields.
Quinn was waiting in the Gator with the motor running by the time I joined him. I set my cane on the wagon bed and climbed into the passenger seat. There was no sign of the sandwich, just a crumpled napkin shoved in the open glove compartment.
“When are you going to work things out with your brother and sister?” he asked, as he shifted into first gear and we motored down the driveway toward the winery.
“I own the house,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing to work out.”
“It didn’t sound like that to me.”
“We’ve been over this. Why don’t you run the vineyard and let me handle my family, okay?”
As we pulled into the parking lot next to the winery, he said, “I heard you sold your clock and some other furniture to raise the cash for the destemmer motor.”
“How I got the money is none of your business.”
“Your brother and your father were a whole lot easier to deal with.”
“I was just thinking the same thing about Jacques.”
“You know, one of the reasons I came here is because this place is so underdeveloped and there’s a lot I could do. No offense to your buddy Jacques, but he was resting on his laurels,” he said. “I could put this winery on the map. I could produce some award-winning wines that would give the Californians a run for their money. I could get us noticed.”
I, I, I. I like a man who’s comfortable in his skin. Quinn seemed a bit oversized for his, like the Michelin Man untethered, to be precise. Could he really do all that? Or was he just blowing more hot air?
“Jacques was a very skilled enologist,” I said.
“If you lived in the nineteenth century. Honey, this doesn’t have to be a cottage industry.”
“I’m not looking to mass-produce plonk in a six-pack with screw-top bottles, Quinn,” I said. “Vin de ramassage, Jacques used to call it. Wine from the bottom of the barrel.”
He put the Gator in gear and we roared out of the back of the parking lot, climbing onto the rougher terrain leading toward the vineyards. I held on to the edges of my seat with both hands.
“Look,” he said, “let’s get something straight. When your father hired me, he said he was a hands-off manager and he’d let me do the job the way I saw fit. If you’re going to big-foot every decision I make, then we’re not going to get along and I need to be looking for another job.”
I hate ultimatums or being backed into a corner. My first instinct was to take him up on his offer to move on. Surely I could find someone equally qualified who would be more pleasant to work with. How hard could it be to find a winemaker who didn’t have the personality of Dirty Harry and dress in Salvation Army couture?
Though, of course, it was possible he actually could deliver on those boasts. What if he were good enough to make us into a first-class vineyard, like he said? He was ambitious, like I was. Actually, he was pushy. But we both wanted the same thing.
Too bad Leland wasn’t the best judge of character. Eli said he’d hired Quinn because he came cheap. But why would Quinn sell himself short if he thought he was so good? It was possible he’d left California, the Mecca of American wine making, to come to Virginia because the potential here appealed to his maverick side. But it was also possible he’d left for another reason and Leland hadn’t bothered to inquire about it.
I couldn’t afford to have Quinn walk out now, just before harvest. But I wasn’t going to let him run the place as blindly as Leland intended, either.
“The difference between Leland and me,” I said, “is that he wasn’t interested in the vineyard. I am. Just like my mother was.”
“Meaning?”
“My mother and Jacques worked together, as a team. He made the call about when to pick, when to blend, when to press…al
l those decisions. But he consulted with her on everything and she had her own opinions.”
“I assume she knew something about what she was doing?”
“I’m not a novice,” I said. “Give me some credit. I grew up here. Jacques taught me and I paid attention. The summer before I…before my accident, I worked here full time.”
“A hobby,” he said, “is not the same as a profession.”
“It was my mother’s life’s work! My family’s name is on every bottle of wine that leaves here. It is not a hobby. It is a passion! They’re different.”
He was silent, but he’d shifted the Gator back into first gear so now we’d slowed considerably as we approached the beginning of the Chardonnay block.
“Besides,” I continued, as his silence grew into a substantial void, “unlike Leland, I’d sell every piece of furniture we own to finance the expansion you’re talking about.”
That unstuck his tongue. Money. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll listen to what you have to say, but I run the show. Completely. We’ll see if it works. If it does, I’ll stay. If it doesn’t, I’m gone at the end of harvest.”
“Fine.”
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 fe
w 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.