by Ellen Crosby
“Sure. Where is it?”
It was in a different bay, on its own. I retrieved it and set it on the table in front of him so it wasn’t in the direct beam of an overhead spotlight. The bottle, its contents dark and viscous as blood, gleamed mysteriously.
He picked it up like he was holding the Holy Grail. “Amazing.”
“You’re sure it’s real?”
“Let me give you a little history lesson.” He set the bottle down carefully. “Until the late 1600s, there was no such thing in France as a wine produced by a single château. They mingled the grapes harvested from different places, so what they produced didn’t have much connection with the land.”
“Terroir,” I said, and he nodded.
“Château Margaux—which you’ve got here—was one of the first châteaus to make wine from vines grown solely in their own vineyard. That put them at the head of the curve in wine-making methodology and they stayed there.” He ticked off his fingers. “Two things. Glass and cork. By the time this wine was bottled, heavier glass suitable for aging wine and shipping it had come into use. Plus the French had switched from capping their bottles with a layer of olive oil and wax to using cork.”
He paused to fill his own glass with the last of the Cab. “What was I just saying?”
“Using cork instead of olive oil and wax.”
“Right. So now they could ship wine. By the eighteenth century the Portuguese—the primary suppliers of cork—had invented an elongated bottle with a short neck and a shoulder. Of course since every bottle was blown by mouth the shapes were slightly irregular.” He caressed the Washington wine from the neck down to the flared shoulder with the back of his index finger. “Anyway, the new shape meant the bottles could be stacked on their sides—instead of keeping them upright—so the corks would no longer dry out and the wine wouldn’t spoil. Good for long voyages, like crossing the Atlantic.”
He indicated the Margaux. “This bottle is perfectly consistent with what was historically available in 1790. Also, Thomas Jefferson always asked for his wines—especially his Bordeaux—to be shipped in bottles rather than casks.”
“Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to ship in casks?” I asked.
“Sure, but the odds of the wine he ordered and the wine he got being one and the same were slim to none.” Ryan drank more Cab, then pushed back his chair and hunched down so he was eye level with the broad-shouldered bottle. “If the French—especially in the south of France—hadn’t doctored the wine to fake Jefferson out and give him what he thought he’d ordered, then the men on the boats who brought the wine across the Atlantic or up the river drank their fill of his casks and topped them off with river water afterward so they were still full.”
I made a face. “That is disgusting.”
“Jefferson thought so, too.” He sat up again. “Eighteenth-century wine fraud. We’ve got no monopoly on it. Happened all the time. Which is why TJ insisted on bottles, especially for Bordeaux. And, as we know, not all of those bottles made it to Monticello or Mount Vernon. Like this one.”
“The wine in this bottle,” I said, “is not in very good condition.”
“Would you be in good condition if you were almost two hundred and fifty years old?” He brushed his finger lightly over the rough-etched lettering in the glass—1790, Margaux, and the initials, G.W. “Look at that color, though. Spectacular.”
“A lot of the wine is gone,” I said.
“Down to mid-shoulder.” Ryan said. “I don’t have a problem with that. You know you’re going to get seepage in a wine this old. The cork is slightly dry, but in excellent condition, considering.”
What he didn’t mention, though, was that the ullage—the space between the wine and the cork—was filled with oxygen. Just as too much oxygen can rust metal or turn apples brown, too much air kills wine.
“It’s a shame the châteaus didn’t keep records that long ago,” I said. “I guess we’re lucky Jefferson did.”
“Exactly.” Ryan drained his wineglass. “Here’s what you’ve got. The bottle is the right age. Mid-shoulder level is consistent with a wine that old. And here’s the clincher. When Jefferson came back to the United States after serving as ambassador to France, he wrote a letter in 1790 ordering a large quantity of Bordeaux for himself and George Washington. In that letter he specified that the shipments should be marked with their respective initials so they’d get to their proper destinations. You’re looking at one of the bottles he never got.”
I chewed my lip and stared at the initials.
“Why are you shaking your head?” he said.
I leaned closer to the bottle of wine. “I wonder what Valerie knew that we don’t.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. Are you still on about her?” He threw up his hands and accidentally brushed against the bottle. It teetered and we both grabbed for it. I caught it.
“Jesus.” He looked stunned. “Wouldn’t that have been something, knocking it over right here?”
“I’ll just put this big boy back where he belongs for safekeeping. You sit tight.”
When I returned he was rolling the balloon of his wineglass between both hands, staring into it like he was looking into a crystal ball.
“You’re absolutely sure that it’s authentic?” I said. “Stake your reputation on it?”
He smiled wickedly. “Not 100 percent sure. But there is a way of finding out.”
“What’s that?”
“We could drink it.”
“Nice try.” I swiped his wineglass and put both of our glasses on a counter for washing in the morning. “Thanks for your time.”
“You’ll get my bill.”
I walked him to his car. “How well did you know Valerie Beauvais?” I asked.
“Well enough to know what a snake in the grass she was.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “Gives me a motive for killing her, doesn’t it?”
“You need more than a motive,” I said. “What about opportunity?”
“Apparently I had that, too,” he said. “Two deputies already talked to me and they don’t like my alibi.”
“Which is?”
“Home alone in bed. I’ve got a witness but the dog doesn’t like officers of the law so he’s not talking.”
I smiled. “Did you do it?”
He looked startled. “Hell, no.” He pulled his keys out of his pocket and tossed them in the air. As he caught them he said, “Guess I got lucky. Someone else beat me to it.”
Chapter 7
A beam of red light shone outside my kitchen window as I finished my dinner dishes. I watched it bob up and down as it moved past the rosebushes toward the summerhouse. When Quinn wanted to preserve his night vision he used a red flashlight. It was just after eight o’clock. Early for him.
Of all the surprising discoveries I’d made about my eccentric winemaker, the most unexpected was his passion for astronomy. Before he died, my father gave Quinn permission to bring a telescope to the summerhouse with its panoramic and mostly un-light-polluted view of the night sky from the valley all the way to the Blue Ridge. But Quinn and I had a falling out a while back when I thought he was turning the place into a love nest. In a fit of anger, he’d removed the telescope and his copies of Stardate, a magazine I once thought pertained to online dating.
Maybe he’d brought the telescope back and forgotten our tiff. I pulled on a hooded sweatshirt that had been hanging on the back of a chair and got my cane. My night vision hadn’t adjusted as well as his and I yelped when I got caught on the thorns of one of the rosebushes.
He came out of the summerhouse. “What are you doing here?”
“Impaling myself in the dark. What do think I’m doing here? I came to see what you’re looking at.” I tugged the sleeves of my sweatshirt so they covered my hands. It was cooler than I expected. “Did you bring your telescope?”
In the near darkness his face was darker shadows and planes, his eyes black poo
ls of negative space. “I thought you didn’t want me stargazing out here.”
He hadn’t forgotten the argument.
“That was a misunderstanding and you know it,” I said.
“It’s still at my place,” he said. “Packed up.”
“You could bring it back, if you wanted.”
“Is that so?” he said. “Thanks. I’ll think about it.”
I didn’t like the way he kept staring at me. “If you don’t have your telescope, what made you come here tonight?”
“Wanted a view of the harvest moon. There’s only one each year. Tonight’s the night. Too many trees at my place for a good view.” He walked back to the summerhouse and opened the door. I heard something scraping inside. “Grab that door, will you?”
He hauled one of my mother’s weather-beaten Adirondack chairs outside and positioned it so it looked out over the valley.
“You staying?” he asked. “Or were you just checking up on me?”
“I’ll stay.”
“You don’t need to.”
“I’d like to. Unless you’d rather be alone.”
“Don’t complicate things. I asked, didn’t I?” He went back inside and got another chair.
“There are lots of harvest moons,” I said.
“Nope. There’s only one that’s closest to the autumnal equinox. That’s the real harvest moon.” He set the second chair close to the first. “Have a seat. Moon’s behind that cloud bank. When it moves away, you’ll see it.”
I set my cane down and sat next to him, leaning against the weather-coarsened wood. He pulled a cigar out of his jacket pocket, unwrapped it, and rustled in another pocket for matches. I watched the familiar ritual as his match flared and he bent his head, puffing until the cigar was lit. The tip glowed like a mini-moon and I breathed in the familiar scent of his tobacco.
He sat back as the clouds slowly moved off and the enormous moon, the color of a ripe wheel of Leicester cheese, hung in the sky above our heads.
“It’s gorgeous,” I said.
“Yup.” He stretched his legs out in front of him and crossed them.
“You know in France, they used to care for the grapes according to the phases of the moon,” I said. “Planting, picking, pruning. Maybe we should try it some time.”
“The French also believe it’s bad luck to have women around at harvest.” He looked at me and puffed on the cigar. “I don’t suppose you’d like to try that sometime?”
I tucked my feet under me and wrapped my arms around my knees. “You are such a Neanderthal, you know that?”
He laughed. “I just don’t buy into that crap, that’s all. Give me science any day. Speaking of which, I’ve been thinking about the Cab blend.”
“You think about it nonstop.” But to tell the truth, so did I. Until we got the grapes picked and into the barrels, I’d be as restless and preoccupied as he was.
“Damn lucky for you that I do,” he said. “I want this year to be out of this world. We could screw up everything else, but you know how much rides on this one.”
I didn’t expect him to sound so somber. Most of the time he acted like he had a grace and favor relationship with St. Vincent, the patron saint of winegrowers, who whispered in his ear. But I understood what he meant. Of all the wines we produced, Cabernet Sauvignon was our most valuable—the one whose sales really paid the bills at the vineyard.
“It’ll be great,” I said. “As long as we aren’t picking too late. If we get an overnight freeze while that wine is still sitting in the vats, there goes fermentation until next spring when it warms up again.”
“If we pick early there’ll be too much acid,” he said. “You want people getting heartburn when they drink our wine? It’s a nightmare to fix wine with too much acid.”
“You’re still talking like a Californian,” I said. “Out there you never had to worry about high acidity. If you pick too late your only problem is that the alcohol content goes through the roof.”
His cigar glowed serenely in the dark. “High alcohol content’s easier to take care of than too much acid.”
“Sure,” I said. “You just add water to rehydrate the yeast.”
The minute I said that, I regretted it. I glanced over at him but he was still staring straight ahead, watching the sky. His profile looked like it had been cast in steel.
“I was talking about stuck fermentation,” I said.
“I know you were.” But he sounded brusque and I knew it was because I’d indirectly brought up Le Coq Rouge. “Adding water is not the only way to deal with it, either. You can use a glycol heater.”
“I know.”
Too bad I hadn’t mentioned that instead, though my comment could have hit a nerve for any winemaker. We all wrestled with the dilemma of how much to fiddle with a wine to fix it or improve it, and still consider it the “original” wine. California had problems when their grape sugar stopped converting to alcohol, known as stuck fermentation. In Virginia we had the opposite problem. Our alcohol content was often too low so we added sugar to boost it, a practice known as chapitalising. Both processes meant we were tinkering with the wine—but no winemaker considered them fraudulent.
So if that was okay, was it also acceptable to top off bottles from an outstanding year with a bottle of the same wine from a less stellar year? It was only a small amount of wine and the practice was known as recorking. Had the winemaker diluted the fantastic vintage, or was it still worth the same price? And where did you draw the line at how much was too much?
“I’m sorry,” I said to Quinn.
“Forget it.” He stirred in his chair. “How’d it go with the asshole?”
“You shouldn’t call Ryan that and it went fine. We need him. He knows his stuff.”
“He’s still an asshole.” He puffed again on the cigar. “By the way, Mick left a message at the vineyard earlier. Asked if you’d call him. Something about Amanda and a tent.”
“For the auction. We’ve got so many people coming we might need to move it outside, on account of the Washington wine.”
I wondered why Mick had called the vineyard instead of calling me directly. Maybe he’d tried my dead cell and the mailbox was full. Maybe he just wanted to leave a message and avoid talking to me after the other night.
Quinn read my thoughts. “What’s going on with you two? You back together again?”
“The thing at Mount Vernon was a business-related dinner. That’s all.” I didn’t want to discuss it. “Look, I’d better get inside. We have an early start tomorrow.”
“Yeah, I’m ready to go, too.”
He stood up and held out his hand. I took it and he pulled me up. His skin felt rough and callused. Nothing like Mick’s, who, I’d heard, had a manicurist come to his home on a regular basis.
“Lucie!”
“What?”
“I asked what time you’re getting there in the morning.”
“When are you getting there?”
He rolled his eyes. “I just told you. Six-thirty.”
“Okay, I’ll be there at six-thirty, too.”
He was still holding my hand as we walked through the rose garden. “Watch your step near those thorns.” He let go of my hand once we passed by the roses and fished in his pocket for his car keys. “See you in the morning.”
“Good night.” I didn’t look back, but I was sure he stayed and watched me cross the lawn to the veranda. A moment later I heard his car engine start and the sound of tires on the gravel driveway.
I lay in bed and wondered what, if anything, had just happened between us. Only the other day he’d said what a mistake it had been to start an affair with Bonita. And that it was a bad idea to mix business and personal relationships.
When I finally fell asleep I dreamed I found Valerie’s car on its roof in Goose Creek again and I needed to rescue her. But when I finally managed to fling open the car door, another woman hung suspended in mid-air.
Not Valerie. Me.
&n
bsp; Harvest is morning work. We pick when it’s cool and generally stop by noon or shortly afterward, depending on the heat. On this October day, Columbus Day, sunrise came at six forty-five. I woke in darkness just before my alarm went off at six and switched on the light on my bedside table. The local Leesburg radio station promised another Indian summer day once the sun came up. Temperatures in the low eighties. Perfect weather. I dressed and drove over to the vineyard.
Jacques Gilbert, our first winemaker and, unlike Quinn, a classical music aficionado, used to compare the process of growing grapes and making wine to the movements of a symphony. Allegro during spring and summer when the vines flourished and veraison, or ripening, began. Andante in winter when the vineyard was blanketed with snow and the vines were dormant. Harvest was presto, and vivace meant the release of a new wine. I loved his analogy except for harvest, which for me demanded a music of its own. Something Latino that pulsed and throbbed—songs like the ones the men played on their boom boxes as they worked and sang in the fields. Earthy, sensual…with sizzle, flashing skirts, and stiletto heels. Something sexy.
Quinn was working on the pump, which he’d moved to the crush pad by the time I arrived. He was dressed in jeans and a UC-Davis T-shirt that looked new. Probably a gift from Bonita, who’d studied viticulture and enology at Davis. I wondered why he’d worn it today—or if it were just the first clean thing he’d found in his drawer.
Manolo showed up at seven driving Hector’s old Superman blue pickup with our regular crew and half a dozen day laborers from a camp in Winchester sitting in the open back. It still tugged at my heart that Hector wasn’t behind the wheel as he’d been last year. I waved at Manolo, who stopped at the crush pad to let off a few of the men. He waved back and drove on, taking the rest of them out to the fields. By now it was light but the sky was still colorless. I watched the small, dark figures drop gracefully off the back of the truck and pick up yellow lugs at the end of the row before disappearing into the tangle of vines, grapes, and leaves.
No wine can be better than the grapes from which it came. But it can be a lot worse if the winemaker screws anything up—picking at the wrong time or making a bad call during the fermentation process. Quinn looked stressed as he often did at harvest, chewing on an unlit cigar and giving orders in a brusque, businesslike voice. Any tenderness he’d shown last night at the summerhouse had evaporated like morning mist off the vines. I got busy weighing the lugs when they came in filled with grapes. Later Quinn asked me to run the tests in the lab.