Don Paulo nodded. ‘You may, Carlos. Who am I to stand in the way of a young man’s legitimate pleasure? ‒ especially since, Lady Patricia, he will tell the story of our sherry as well as it can be done. I trained him myself.’ He rose, as my mother did.
‘I should be delighted to be shown through the bodega. I promise you, though, I’m very ignorant and stupid. I don’t know anything except a very little about horses.’
‘Ah, horses …’ Carlos echoed. They were off in pursuit of my mother’s true subject, and his enthusiasm seemed to match hers. They had reached the door before he was aware that I had not stood up. He looked back at me. ‘Are you not coming, Miss Charlotte? Or shall we call you Doña Carlota? Much prettier, I think. Carlota suits you.’
‘We call her Charlie,’ my mother ingenuously volunteered.
His nose wrinkled in distaste. ‘That will never do. It sounds like a pet dog. Are you coming, Doña Carlota?’
I hesitated. My mother was spellbound by the charm and good looks of this young man, who seemed very sure of them himself. She had entirely forgotten the purpose of the visit. I had no doubt that during the tour of the bodega more beautiful fino wine would be drunk. They would talk horses and wine, these two, until the hour of the late Spanish lunch came around. The sun would grow fierce, and my mother would need all her strength to mount Balthasar again, and stay in the saddle until we returned to that old dark house. Another day would have passed with no questions asked, and no answers given.
‘Charlie is a good name for a terrier, Don Carlos,’ I answered. I turned back to Don Paulo. ‘Terriers tend to hold on once they have taken their bite. You must allow me to stay a little longer. A few questions only …’
Carlos bowed, having first glanced at his father for his direction. ‘Then I shall have the double pleasure of taking you through the bodega at some later time. Promise me, Father, that the honour shall go to no one else.’
He closed the door quietly. For a few seconds I could hear my mother’s heels rap on the marble floor, and the sound of their voices, my mother’s laugh, that infectious, uncaring sound I had listened to all my life. For the moment my mother was happy. And the business details could be left to me.
I looked at Don Paulo, and I was frightened. His expression was wintry, without encouragement. What had made me think I could handle a man like this? I tried a weak joke. ‘Perhaps I should have said a bulldog, Don Paulo. They are the ones with the reputation of never letting go.’
He did not smile. ‘You have a certain beauty, Doña Carlota. The bulldog is an ugly, if endearing creature. But they say he has a heart that once fixed is never shaken. I wonder if that temperament is yours? Or are you like Pepita, there, who gives her heart to every passing stranger?’
The words chilled me. The gift of Pepita had not been made out of generosity, but with a sense of contempt. He had given what he little valued, the affection of a hound who loved everyone. I felt I had run headlong to a collision with the extreme of the Spanish reputation for pride, austerity in the midst of riches, and a streak of cruelty, as Richard Blodmore had warned me. I delayed a long time, growing more frightened, afraid to speak lest my voice should tremble. I would not betray my fear of this man. At last impatience broke through his façade of Spanish courtesy.
‘Come, say what you must, and be done with it. You will not leave here without answers, I can see. You are not like your mother.’
I put my glass on the table, and took a deep breath. ‘We had begun to talk, Don Paulo, before your son arrived, about my grandfather’s investment in the bodega. We wondered if it was substantial, or trivial. All we know is that the monies paid by your bodega remained here in Jerez.’
‘The monies due under that investment were paid into the Banco de Jerez. What happened to them after that is no concern of mine.’
‘Can you tell me then, Don Paulo, how my grandfather came to make such an investment? ‒ it was a surprise to us to learn of it after his death.’
He looked at me coldly, as if he hated to admit what he now must. ‘Your grandfather, Dona Carlota, happened to come to Jerez ‒ some twenty-five years ago ‒ at a time when my own business was in need of money. All businesses experience such times. Selling shares in anything that concerns my family is not something that pleases me. But I regarded your father as a gentleman, a possible asset to our business while having no say in its running. I thought of him as a possible ambassador of our wine. If one may be permitted ‒ I saw him as a possible salesman for our particular sherries, rather than our rivals’. In those days Blodmore mixed in rather different circles than he was … was reduced to in the end.’
‘Any circle my grandfather chose to move in was the better for it, Don Paulo.’
Again that touch of a wintry smile. ‘You are loyal, I see. As your mother is. I like that, Doña Carlota. Family loyalty ranks high on my list of virtues.’
‘I am not here to discuss virtues, Don Paulo. I have few to discuss.’
He shrugged. ‘Then what am I to talk about? When the dividends were paid each year into the bank, that was the end of the matter, as far as I was concerned.’
I almost blurted out a question about the note that had come each year with its cryptic message ‘She lives!’ But a newly found sense of caution warned me. One did not show all one’s cards to a man like Don Paulo. And I said nothing about the fact that Don Paulo had married the woman my grandfather had been expected to marry. No, one did not say such things. Not yet.
My silence seemed to needle him. He took up the thread again. ‘A number of times, Doña Carlota, I offered to buy back the interest your grandfather owned in the bodega. He did not respond. After we had news of his death, I repeated my offer to your solicitors. Again there was no response. Now you are here asking questions. I can only tell you that out of your grandfather’s share of the original bodegas ‒ the business as it existed at that time, he took the good times and the bad times of the sherry trade. When we had the scourge of the phylloxera in 1896, and our vineyards were destroyed, no one had any profits. No one. Have you any idea, Doña Carlota, how long it takes before a vineyard will produce its first usable grape? In some cases four years. If a man is wise, he will wait five years. Five years is a long time to keep ploughing money into the earth with no return. Five years we took before we had a harvest from our devastated vineyards, and many are not replanted to this day. To tend the young vines ‒ to tend the vines at any time, is both a duty and an honour for the viticulturalist. It all, however, costs a great deal of money. Those were lean years in Jerez, and we are now just beginning to emerge from them. We had the stocks of our bodegas, of course, but we could not sell off all that we had ‒ there would have been nothing from which to replenish the solera. So we waited, and tended our vines, and no one grew very rich in those years. Nor did your grandfather’s bank account wax very fat. However, you will find it all in order, every dividend scrupulously accounted for. The years we paid no dividends are the empty ones, when we had no profits. The state of your grandfather’s bank account will be communicated to you by Don Ramon Garda, who is head of the Banco de Jerez. I myself will send a messenger to him.’
He leaned back, and his words were slow. ‘And now, Doña Carlota, I would like to renew my offer to buy back those shares. I will make a handsome offer ‒ well above their market price. Though their market price will be hard to determine, since it is still a privately held company. But the offer will be handsome. Enough to make the return to Ireland much easier, your settling down again more pleasant. I will even ‒ I will even take that monstrous ruin of a house off your hands. It would cost a fortune to repair it, but the ground it stands on has some value. Perhaps as a site for a new bodega … That needn’t trouble you. Instead of a ruinous house, you will have the money to buy in Ireland …’
‘The vineyard?’ I murmured.
His lips stretched thinly. ‘You are greedy, Doña Carlota. The vineyard your grandfather bought is worth nothing but the value of it
s ‒ albariza soil ‒ the soil which produces the sherry grape. It was one of the vineyards never replanted after the phylloxera scourge. Why should I buy such a thing? There is plenty of my own albariza land which is not yet planted in vines. I could expand in many directions, and will do so as conditions of the trade permit.’ Then he waved a hand as if granting a sweet to a child. ‘But so ‒ if you insist. I will buy the vineyard.’
I shook my head then, and smiled. I was no longer so afraid of him. For some reason he wished us gone, and the knowledge gave me a sense of power. ‘But that is not, of course, for me to agree to, Don Paulo. Is it? It is my mother who owns these things. It is she you must make your offer to.’
He gestured as if dismissing me. ‘You think I am a fool? It is you, Doña Carlota, who will make the decisions. You are hardly more than a child, but you are older than your mother. You will accept my offer, I am sure of that.’
‘My mother appears to like Jerez. She says she will stay.’
He nodded, and his eyes almost closed. ‘Very well, then. Play your game if you must. My offer stands. My bodega is for me ‒ for me and for my family. We want no outsiders.’
I rose. ‘Then may I, Don Paulo, see the bodega? I am anxious to see where my ‒ my mother’s interests lie.’
He considered for a moment, staring at me silently, gently swirling the last of the wine in his glass. He rose. ‘Come ‒ I will show you the bodega.’
‘Carlos …?’
‘I will show you the bodega, Doña Carlota. You will have the best guide in Jerez.’
IV
We walked through the passageway laced with the overhanging vines, and the heat smote us. He led me to one of the big open doors of the nearest bodega, and I paused for a moment, my eyes unable to focus in the dim light. I became aware gradually of the huge space about me, and the quiet. It was a vast building, vaulted in arches, which rested on thick pillars, almost like a church. There was a smell of wood, and wine and damp. We walked on a cobbled pathway between piled rows of dark butts all with chalk markings on them in symbols I couldn’t understand. Both the cobbled path and the earth underneath the butts were damp, but the butts were raised from the earth itself, resting on stout wooden beams.
Don Paulo stopped in the middle of the bodega, his eyes sweeping upwards to the high roof, to the barred windows high in the walls, which were shielded on the side where the sun hit, by grass blinds, like mats rolled down. He had taken a stick with him and he pointed, left and right, up and down, at all the intersecting rows of butts.
‘The smell,’ he said. ‘The smell is like nowhere else on earth. That is our wine as it soaks through the oak casks. The wine has to breathe, so we leave it only lightly stoppered. We bring all our wine from the vineyards and collect it here in the town itself. Down here it matures best. It likes its own company. It breathes through the wood itself, and through the bung hole. We never completely fill a butt so that large parts of the wine within it is exposed to air. There are few ways to be miserly in the making of sherry. The casks are oak, and those in which we ship our wine abroad are snapped up by the whisky distillers, because the sherry-soaked wood gives their maturing alcohol colour and flavour. We call the butts which stay here permanently in the bodega madres ‒ mothers. They have the quality of age and are very valuable.’
His speech had become slower, the tone almost ruminative. The antagonism that had bristled between us in his office seemed left behind. Now he was talking as a man talks of something he loves, as if the wine were a person, someone precious, of individuality. Glancing at him as he talked, it seemed to me that his face and eyes had assumed almost the same expression as when Carlos had entered his office. I began to sense that this man who could appear so coldly reserved, detached, could also be capable of great, and perhaps terrible passions. His wine was one of his passions. I was suddenly aware of, was given a glimpse of him as he might have been as a young man, when his passion was turned towards a woman.
He pointed to the butts stacked about us, reaching high over our heads. ‘The solera system makes our wine different from any other. We have no vintage years in sherry. Instead, we strive to achieve a uniform wine, one which does not vary in quality, age or character, in whichever of the broad groupings of fino, amontillado or oloroso it happens to fall. What we are doing is moving and mixing our wine in a sort of perpetual cycle.
‘A solera consists of a number of casks stacked in tiers, or as we say here, scales. Here ‒’ pointing with his stick from one side of the aisle to the other where the casks were stacked three high, ‘is an example of a solera of six scales. This bottom one, the first scale, contains wine ready to be sold. This is the real solera ‒ the other scales we call criaderas ‒ nurseries. The scale above the solera has butts containing wine about a year younger, and the one above a year younger still. Over here are the fourth, fifth and sixth scales. The sixth scale will hold wine which is about five years younger than the wine in the first scale. The wines of the different scales are always of the same kind, and whenever possible, they come from the same vineyard. The number of scales for the fino must be larger than for the more full-bodied amontillados and olorosos, because the full-bodied wines vary much less from year to year than the finos. The scales of the solera can run from four to seven.
‘When we draw off wine to sell from the bottom, the first scale, we take an equal amount from each cask of that scale. Then we top up the ullage with the wine drawn from the second scale, and this amount is then made up with wine from the third scale. And so on, right through the fourth, fifth and sixth scales, if the solera requires that many scales. In the bodega we call this “running the scales”. Wine, of course, changes as it matures, usually gaining more strength, body and colour. By using our solera system we compensate for the change produced by age. We refresh and rejuvenate the older wine by blending it with the younger one.
‘I’ve used a rather simplistic example of the solera, Doña Carlota. It is easier for the newcomer to understand the solera if we stand here and say “we draw off the wine from the lowest scale, and top up from the scale above it”, and so on … It is easier to picture it happening that way. But in reality we often separate the scales of the solera which belong to one another. The lowest level is ideal for maturing the finos because they need a lower temperature ‒ so you might find the third and fourth scales of a particular solera in the two bottom tiers in another part of the bodega. We might put a criadera of oloroso on the third tier, because it likes a higher temperature to mature. The various scales of our very important soleras are often divided between different buildings because of the hazard of fire destroying them all.’
He paused, his eyes moving over the dark butts with their white markings. When he spoke again, his tone was musing. ‘I have often thought, Doña Carlota, how wonderful it would be if we could apply the solera system to ourselves. Think, as we aged, if we could draw on the young for refreshment and invigoration. We feel we should be able to draw on our children for these qualities which we begin to lose, but mostly what we end up doing is merely envying them ‒ which is useless.’
‘Surely,’ I ventured, ‘the young have a callowness you’d hardly want to mix with your own maturity, Don Paulo.’
‘Age without youth dies,’ he answered. ‘Perhaps you will still be here in September when we harvest our grapes, and press them, and bring in the liquid from the pressing to the bodegas. We call this liquid musto ‒ must. It is not then wine. Even as it is brought to the bodega it goes into a state of violent fermentation. The fermentation is natural ‒ quite spontaneous. The must froths and bubbles ‒ it boils, and sometimes, although we leave room for this when filling the cask, it overflows, bubbles over. This to me is the excitement, the strength and enthusiasm of youth. Some people describe the smell it has then as nasty, and it is certainly undrinkable. So youth has its bad qualities, but we older ones observe, and smell, and mark and classify, trying to eliminate what is undesirable, and to encourage that which we th
ink will make great wine. Some we see are only fit for wine spirits or for vinegar. We call them mustos de quema ‒ musts for burning. But for me all the tumult of youth is there in the must as it comes to the bodega. It is an exciting time. The must quietens a little in about a week, as youth settles down a little, but it still continues to ferment. We keep it only very lightly stoppered ‒ youth will have its fling. It is during this second, quieter fermentation that the must begins to develop the individual characteristics which will distinguish it in later life. Then when winter comes to Jerez in December or January, the fermentation stops. The must, which up to then has been an opaque and yellowish liquid, becomes clear. The lees settle to the bottom of the cask. This is when we say “the wine falls bright”. Then, and not before, can we begin to tell what type the wine may be.
‘And so, Doña Carlota, youth has turned the corner. The young wine begins to indicate whether it will be fino or oloroso.’
He clapped his hands together and called out some order in Spanish. Almost at once a man appeared, as if he had been in waiting for the summons. He brought with him an object Don Paulo called a venencia, an object which looked to me something like a candle-snuffer. It was a small, cylindrical cup made of silver, on a black flexible whalebone rod, finished with a decorative silver hook. The man also carried stemmed sherry glasses, perhaps ten of them, between his fingers.
Don Paulo indicated one particular butt, and the man hastened to remove its wooden bung. With a swift movement Don Paulo plunged the silver cup through the hole. He took a copa from the attending man. Holding the venencia high, he poured the liquid in a long, steady stream which fell, miraculously, it seemed to me, into the narrow neck of the sherry glass. It was a gesture of great flamboyance and skill. ‘Only the smallest sip,’ he said, handing it to me. ‘You will not like it. It is last year’s harvest,’ The wine was slightly muddied, thin and acid to the taste.
The Summer of the Spanish Woman Page 11