by Peter Prasad
He turned to Semper. “Shall we take a walk? Show me your terroir. Do you mind? Vanessa, fetch me bottled water. Be a darling. Anything with a spring in it.” He reached for Semper’s elbow and tugged him toward the door.
Semper was bowled over by the buyer’s eagerness and decided to play along. He turned to Vanessa. “Set up a dozen wine glasses. We’ll be right back.” Together, he and Vanderblake flowed out the door, arm in arm.
Vanderblake’s black Jodhpur boots mashed through the red clay soil at a sprightly pace. He strolled headfirst down a row of vines, stopping to caress the occasional bunch of grapes, muttering to himself. Semper overheard his guest mutter phrases like: ripe, bursting, bouquet, skin, sun-kissed, orb and whatnot. He watched his London buyer, off into a world of his own, communing with vine and field.
At the end of the row, Vanderblake spun around and clapped his hands together. “Excellent. Now let’s drink. Shall we taste the fruit and sup upon the magic you make?” Semper turned to lead him back to the tasting set-up in the office. The tour had taken fewer than ten minutes.
On the way back inside, Vanderblake fired off his first volley of questions. “You’ll be harvesting very soon, I’m sure? At what brix? What sugar levels excite you? You’ll use migrants to harvest, I assume? Do you crush here? I see no equipment? Contract out I presume? Blend yourself do you? Oak barrels, redwood or stainless steel? Or a brief respite in all three? Do tell, Dr. Semper, do tell? London must know everything. I’ve heard good things about you. And about some naughtiness from an enemy or two.”
Meekly, Semper replied, “Yes, indeed, we’ll get to all those details. I see you’re a man who knows the soil. We have more than fifty acres under vine. Twenty more in ecological set-aside. Yes, we contract out. Yes, I am the blending master of all you see.”
“It’s my business, sir. Tottenham trades in only the finest. We are purveyors to the Duchess of York, no less. Whitehall and Windsor have been known to call us.”
An animated froth of black curls bounced atop Vanderblake’s head whenever he spoke or nodded. He had mastered the art of using his head as a punctuation mark in order to add emphasis to anything he said.
Back at the wine bar, he lifted an empty glass and studied it for cleanliness in the light pouring through the window. He nodded approval. “Too often I find I am handed a glass that wears someone else’s lipstick. I approve your hygiene.” He smiled at Vanessa, whose lips shined a bright red.
“A full flight tasting perhaps? A taste from the barrel? Shall we work our way up the list?” Semper inquired. Vanessa placed a cream-colored Fransec wine list on the table top in front of Vanderblake.
“How plebian. We start at the top. Stay at the top. And I shall drink each drop.” Jared replied.
“Very well,” Semper replied, playing humble. He was outmatched by this buyer’s brass. “Let’s start at the top, shall we? Our bottler has just returned the first case of Fransec Estate Superior, 2003. You are the first. May I?”
Semper uncorked a bottle, poured a small taste, sniffed it, examined the cork, and poured a larger glass into a wine goblet for the buyer from London. Both men swirled their glasses of wine, and sniffed warily.
“The label is not finished, so there is opportunity for you, Jared. I can add, ‘Exclusive to Tottenhams,’ if you’d like?” Semper smiled sweetly.
“Don’t rush your duckies, dear chap,” Vanderblake replied, arching a single eye brow. “It smells over-oaked.”
“That will surely age out. It will be divinely timed for the holiday season,” Semper replied.
Vanderblake swirled his wine and raised the glass to his lips. “Let’s see if you have the stuff to inspire Bacchus himself.”
He tasted the wine, aerated it by inhaling through closed lips, pointed his eyes toward the ceiling and gargled, then howled. He hopped up, waving his arms in the air urgently, and did not look down when his glass tipped over and spilled across the table. Semper grabbed a small towel and mopped up the spill.
Vanderblake dashed around the room, looking for a place to spit. His eyes settled on the sink inlaid in the lab work table. He ran to it and sprayed wine across the bottom of the empty sink. Vannie looked on in horror. Semper had no words.
“What the hell have you done?” Vanderblake glared at Semper.
He snapped his fingers, flapped his hands in the air like a demented orchestra conductor, and rinsed his mouth with tap water from the sink. Then he bellowed, “Frog farts. Absolute frog farts. Get your pipette and show me the barrel immediately.”
Semper stood up from the tasting table, mumbled apologies, pulled a key ring from his pocket, turned and said to Vanderblake, “Please. Follow me.”
As they marched in tandem to the barrel barn, Semper wondered what he might say to save the situation. He was lost in a no-mans-land of pending disaster.
Semper fiddled with the key ring at the locked door. Vanderblake stood behind him, arms crossed and scowling. Semper struggled to slide the door open. Vanderblake leaped ahead of him, stormed into the room and demanded to know which barrel it was.
Semper pointed to the row of barrels along the back side of the building. He picked up a pipette, put it down, picked up a wooden mallet and walked toward the first barrel. He tapped on the bung plug to loosen it, then he pulled the bung from the barrel hole. His hands were shaking, but Vanderblake did not notice.
Vanderblake snatched the pipette from the table and stabbed it through the open bung hole. He snapped his fingers. “There, be a good man, fetch me a glass, Doctor.”
He withdrew the full pipette of red wine from the barrel and swung the long glass cylinder in an arc across the room. Semper chased after the tip of the pipette with a wine glass. He held the tip of the pipette in the glass and watched as Vanderblake lifted his thumb from the open hole at other end. The wine poured into the glass. Meekly he handed the glass to Vanderblake.
Vanderblake lifted one foot up and placed it on the cradle that held the barrel. He rested his hand holding the wine glass on his knee and leaned toward the glass, sniffing. He studied the wine in the light, lifting the glass upward to chase after the sunbeams that poured through the row of western windows.
He brought the glass to his lips, sipped, swirled and spit, arcing a fine spray of wine across the barrel top. “Dr. Semper, what have you done?” He glared at Semper.
Semper swallowed. “Do you like it?”
Vanderblake looked at him through his glaring bug-eyes and cleared his throat. “What’s not to like? It’s fruit forward, long on alcohol and tannins. But it’s not wine. There’s no magic here. Just layers of flavors. Shawn made better wine than this, I dare say.” He slowly turned the wine glass upside down and watched it spill across the raw white oak of the wine barrel.
He placed his empty glass on the table and wiped his hands. “Sorry. No sale. I shall take one bottle back to England and try it in a few months. Maybe it suffers from bottle shock, as you suggest.”
He glared at Semper, who simply nodded his head up and down. Within ten minutes, Vanderblake from Tottenham’s had gathered his sample bottle, packed it in his six-pack carrying case and sat beside Vannie in her Prius. He shook hands with Dr. Semper through the open window.
“I’m off to Opus One, St. Francis and Berringers. Then appointments in Windsor, Healdsburg, and up to Asti. Vanessa can drop me at a vehicle charter agency. I shall trouble you no longer. And mum’s the word. Strictest confidence. But really, Semper, you must do better. Toot-a-loo,” he trilled.
Semper was in a cold fury. His grand pay day was getting away. Tottenham’s had not made the cut. In fact, Semper hoped he’d never see the buyer again. He was such a cretin, as people of his ilk often were. Snobby chain buyers, despite their monograms. Semper calmed himself, thinking that he specialized in discerning collectors, the real connoisseurs. He began wiping his hands as he watched the Prius drive away.
So go the battles of the wine trade. Mother had said it wouldn’t be easy, so what
else did he expect? Win some, lose some; he looked at the numbers in his spreadsheet—he was way ahead of the game and that felt good.
Oh yes, he could make himself feel a twee bit better, he giggled. He opened his desk drawer and found his favorite pick-me-up. He placed a small line of coke on the surface of the desk, and sniffed at it like a vacuum cleaner. His eyes watered. All better now. The tingle ran down to his crotch.
He stared at his spreadsheets for a further ten minutes on the screen of his laptop, then checked his spy cameras. He’d filled an entire computer back-up device with video footage of Vannie on the toilet and in his bed. No time to look at it all now.
He grabbed his car keys, patted his calfskin checkbook holder in his jacket pocket and decided he needed to spend money. He might call his little Vannie later. Or maybe not. The little minx was proving to be a delicious distraction. Oh, how he enjoyed fantasizing about Europe, where people specialized in making love with their faces. He licked a few crumbs of white powder off his desktop.
He opened his desk and retrieved a short list of items he needed. He knew just the place. The clerk looked like a mulatto man mountain with a mushroom-like Afro on his head, but he was smart.
It had been a brutal day He had no time to edit his video montage. He’d just pop out to buy another data storage unit. And mount a new camera in the headboard of the bed in their little love shack. He wanted to watch his little kewpie doll’s face as he spanked her and entered her tight little anus. Now that would be a video memory.
The British buyer was a beast. Pearls before swine and that kind of thing. He had a Panamanian investor group coming in a few days, and it smelled like cash. Their little Latin attorney had called again, ready to dicker. He had put him off, again, but noted he was inquiring about “lock, stock and barrel.” Semper might as well fatten his inventory, again.
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CHAPTER NINTEEN
Jake parked his truck in a lot behind an industrial building off the frontage road in Santa Rosa. A row of signs read: Plumbing Supply, Selma’s Catering, and The Beverage People. The Beverage People provided all the ingredients for home brew beer and wine and artisan cheese.
Jake walked through the facility’s twenty-person classroom and entered the warehouse portion of the building. He greeted Zack and Charlene who sat at the counter on this sunny Sonoma afternoon.
“Jake! Baaah… baaah... how are the sheep?” They greeted him. He smiled and gave them both a thumbs-up sign. He walked to the counter and pulled Sandy’s list from his pocket. He scanned the tubs of grain, the walls lined with recipe books, cheese molds, presses and several refrigerators of ingredients for brewing beer, blending wines and making artisan cheeses. Jake could have stayed for hours to explore the place properly, but for this visit he had other priorities.
He looked at Zack and got right to business. “Sandy wants me to pick up ten packets of the Abiasa Thermophilic Type C, ten grams each.” Jake looked around the room, unsure exactly what that was.
Each packet inoculated 100 pounds of curds. The dairy used two or three packets a week. Zack walked to one of the cooler boxes and opened the door. “You’ll clean us out, but we’ll have more in later this week.”
He returned with a handful of chilled silver packets with red and white labels, origin Canada. It was a cheese starter culture of Streptococcus Thermophilius and Lactococcus Helveticus. He read the label. “Helveticus” was the Latin word for what the Romans had called Switzerland. This was the required culture for an Alpine-style cheese.
“The French have a thousand cultures, but they’ll only export a dozen of them. The cultures vary from cheese cave to cave. Your basics are for hard cheese, soft cheese, alpine style, Roquefort and Blue, Brie and Camembert,” Charlene explained. She and her husband owned the business.
Jake shook his head. “I’m new to all this. I get the milk in the pail. After that, I’m not sure what happens.”
Charlene laughed. “Milk’s the most important ingredient. That’s where the magic of cheese-making begins, the raw canvas for the art form.”
Jake felt appreciated. He had never thought of himself as a raw-ingredient-guy before.
“Shall I wrap it with a chill pack?” Zack asked.
“Please do.”
“I understand you’re selling well down at the Stonestown Sunday market in the City, and the Marin Farmer’s Market. Sandy was in here last week.”
“Is that what she said?” Jake stayed out of the cheese room. His focus at the dairy was on the land, the water and the grass. “We’ve begun the breeding season. That’s going well.”
“You’ll have sheep milk by March. Please tell Sandy we want to schedule her to teach a class in May. You’re getting good word-of-mouth with the Curd Herd. We like your cheese.” Jake knew that Zack was referring to the local cheese club, which met infrequently in the classroom next door, many of whom were hobbyists, cottage industry cheese-makers and an adventurous bunch. Jake had yet to attend a meeting.
He reached for some cash from his pocket and Zack stopped him. “Don’t worry about that. We’ll put it on your account. You’re one of our commercial cheese makers. We bill Sandy every month.”
That was easy, Jake thought, as Zack slipped the packet into a biodegradable plastic bag with The Beverage People logo on the outside.
“You ready to make some beer now?” Zack inquired.
“Maybe over the winter, if Wally finds the time.” Secretly he hoped he would not have to drink his way through a few five-gallon batches of experiments. “So what do you do with a bad batch of beer?” he asked.
“It’s all good, Jake,” Charlene replied. “I use it for beef stew in the crock pot. Can’t let good ingredients go to waste.”
“Lamb stew, maybe, then.” Jake replied with a grin. “Right now I’m up to my elbows in horny rams and bleating ewes. Baaahh-dd.” All three laughed.
“Cow milk is so yesterday,” Zack replied. “We had buyers from San Francisco in the other day. They couldn’t get their hands on any sheep milk cheese.”
“Not this time of year,” Jake replied. All three nodded their heads. “We’ll be weaning lambs this spring, with sheep-milk cheese by April or May.”
“Did the folks from the Marin College cheese program contact you?” Charlene wanted to know.
Jake waved his hands in the air. “Don’t know. Sandy handles all that stuff. I just tote the bale and compost the pellets.” He smiled.
“How’s the leg?” Zack asked.
Jake patted his thigh through his blue jeans. “Right as rain.”
“Yep, we need that. Another few weeks and the heavens will open,” Charlene nodded.
Jake scanned the room again, his eyes trailed across the wide variety of items in stainless steel and industrial plastic. They ran a low-key but thriving business. The downside, as Jake saw it, was that he didn’t want to be tied behind a counter all day. He took the parcel wrapped with a chill-pack and headed for the door.
“Bring us some cheese next time, Jake. Good to see you. Keep on shoveling.”
“That I will, you too,” Jake replied, over his shoulder, as he exited the door.
***
Jake crossed the parking lot to his truck and sat on the worn bench seat. His cell phone sang to him. It was Colonel Hazard.
“Hey, Knight. How you doing?”
“Just fine, Colonel. How are things with you?”
“Been on the phone all morning putting out fires. I’m just a glorified babysitter. How’s the leg?”
“No problem.”
“What are you busy with right now?”
“Up to my elbows in horny rams and bleating ewes. It’s the season for making babies. I’m in Santa Rosa picking up some cheese enzymes.”
Hap laughed. “Well, swing by Founder’s Bank on Main Street. I’m on the top floor.”
“Be right there, Hap.” Jake clicked off to disconnect.
***
The bank building was
one of the oldest in downtown, six stories of red brick and sandstone, prominently displayed on the corner of Main Street facing the tree-lined Old Courthouse Square. The open public space was shaded by a ring of towering redwood trees, green pillars on cinnamon colored trunks, reaching into a shockingly bright blue sky.
Jake parked and caught himself scanning the rooftops—no snipers here. Three communications towers and two satellite dishes pointed east and south. The building looked professionally wired. He assumed it was Hap’s handy work.
He imagined Colonel Hazard sitting above it all in air-conditioned splendor, running a security company and an air charter business, and babysitting millionaires. In twenty years, Jake thought, he might be that man. He looked forward to what Hap might have to say.
Across the street in the square, a fountain gurgled. Three children played on its concrete elliptical lip. Jake could hear their splashes and squeals of delight. He remembered the feeling.
He studied the front of the six-story building. Its sandstone entryway was accented with marble pillars. The marble busts of several of Sonoma’s ancestral lineage peeked from ensconced side wells above the portico of steps, protected by a brass railing.
Sonoma had its booms and busts, but the bad times never entered this building. Unless it walked straight to Colonel Hazard’s door.
The building reeked of fiscal due diligence, with a froth of cattleman-conservative.
It had always been about money, green acres and a side of beef hung to cure.
Jake signed in with the security guard, an elderly man meditating on a roast beef on rye with extra mustard. Jake realized this was one more career option he wished to avoid.
He stood alone in the elevator, waltzing to Muzak, reviewing what he might say to Colonel Hazard. He had no need to rush or gush in the interview. He’d let Colonel Hazard get in all the little bits of gossip and tradecraft that he wanted to share. Jake only saw upside; the Colonel appeared well-connected. He traveled by helicopter.
The elevator doors opened onto a long white marble floor dotted with a series of first-cut redwood doors that glowed with a fine-grained patina of age and wealth, lit by natural light from the skylights above. He detected a surveillance camera mounted on the wall across from the elevator. He watched the camera follow him down the hall. He stopped at the double doors with two brass plaques: Hazard Security and Sonoma Air Charters LLC. The red glow of another security camera mounted over the double doors winked at him.