by Jen Carter
Shane looked like he almost wanted to laugh, but he didn’t say anything. The group ahead of us had slowed to a stop right outside the winemaking facility, and I could see Holly stepping onto a bench next to the big, barn-style doors and pointing toward the rows of grapevines growing just yards behind the building. Shane and I slowed to a stop as well, still with plenty of distance between us and the group.
“If Angelia’s happy, that’s all that matters,” he said finally. He glanced at the group and then turned to me. “But hey, I just wanted to say something. I know we haven’t talked in, like, years, but I wanted to say I’m sorry. A lot of time has passed, and I realize I didn’t handle things well when we were together.”
I waved away the apology. “Don’t worry about it. Everything worked out for the best. You’re happy, I’m happy—things are better this way.”
He almost smiled, looking slightly embarrassed. The expression made his resemblance to Toby even stronger. “I was a jerk,” he said.
Well, that was true. Six years ago, my parents died in a boating accident. Shane and I were engaged, and of course we postponed the wedding. And then we postponed it some more. And some more. I wasn’t handling my grief well, and Shane was handling my grief even worse. Eventually, he tired of waiting for me to move past my loss and broke up with me.
“Yeah, you were,” I said. “But c’mon. We were too young to be engaged anyway. We were twenty-three, and not emotionally-mature twenty-three-year-olds, either. Don’t worry about it.” I tilted my head toward the group. “Let’s go see what Holly is telling your buddies. I’m sure they’re riveted.”
Shane looked toward the building. “If Angelia’s happy,” he muttered, his words trailing off.
As we approached, I heard a voice rising from the middle of the crowd and interrupting Holly.
“Hey, you didn’t charge me the right amount for the wine I bought back there.” Ah, it was Angelia’s mom. “Did you give me the right bottle? I wanted the Chardonnay. The one that was described on the menu as delivering the aromas of peach and Meyer lemon, with a perfect balance of fruit and acidity and a long finish. Enjoy right away or watch as the flavors continue to evolve for up to five years. $25.99.”
“Marlo has an eidetic memory,” her friend interjected. “She can remember anything, even if she only sees it for a second. That’s how she knows exactly what the description said.”
“My receipt doesn’t say $25.99,” Marlo continued, barely waiting for her friend to finish speaking. “I bet this isn’t the right wine. I don’t want some cheap $16.99 bottle.”
Holly smiled, her eyes focused on the two women in the middle of the group. My sister had about ten different smiles, and this one I called the don’t-worry-be-happy smile. She used it when she was marginally invested in what she was doing and just wanted to finish floating through it. “I gave you the friends and family discount,” she said. When Marlo didn’t answer, she gestured toward the building. “Shall we go inside?”
Holly hopped off the bench. As the group started to shuffle forward, Angelia appeared at Shane’s side and took his hand. She pushed her sunglasses to her head, revealing her blue eyes and perfectly-arched eyebrows. She was petite—I’d guess about five-foot-two—and she looked up at Shane for a second before turning her gaze to me.
“Jill!” she said. “So good to see you! I’ve talked quite a bit with your other sister, Stella. Please tell her thank you for arranging this tour for us.”
Before I could reply, the smile dropped from her face, and with an odd, blank stare she pulled Shane to the front of the group. He looked over his shoulder and waved goodbye to me.
“Hey, little wine lady,” someone said from behind. The words were followed by my ponytail being yanked.
Really?
I turned to see that the ponytail yanker was a tall dude wearing a pink polo shirt with a popped collar. I didn’t recognize him as one of Shane’s friends from when we were going out years before. The guy must have been a new friend—a new friend with glazed eyes and a childish way of getting my attention.
“Aren’t you supposed to be teaching us about wine right now?” he asked, his eyelids heavy.
“I sure am. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to join my sister in the front.”
Instead of cutting through the middle and possibly brushing by Angelia or Shane, I took the long way around and joined Holly by the winemaking facility’s doors.
“We call this the barn,” she was saying. “Because, as you can see, it was designed to look like a barn, even though this is where we make wine.”
“Barns are red though,” one girl called out. “This building is gray.”
Holly turned to the security keypad. I got the feeling she wasn’t going to acknowledge the comment.
“I have a question,” a guy said just as Holly raised her hand to input the security code.
She turned toward the voice. “Yes?”
“How’d you learn about wine? I mean, like, what are your qualifications and stuff?”
The guy asking the question wasn’t the ponytail yanker, but I didn’t like him any better with his tone. I was starting to think I didn’t really like Shane’s new friends. I wondered if they were friends that he had made through Angelia.
“Well,” Holly said while turning back to the barn doors. Her fingers flew over the security keypad as she entered the ten-digit code. “I have a Ph.D. in Art History. So the only thing I’m qualified to do is pour wine.” She said it with a light laugh, but I still cringed. The great oak doors slid open, and she motioned for everyone to enter.
As Holly and I waited for the group to filter in past us, I said to her, “You’ve got to stop downplaying your Ph.D. and your wine experience.”
She tilted her head, pursed her lips, and raised her eyebrows. “Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.”
Fair enough.
She pointed to the bench where she had been standing. “I just covered harvesting. Do you want to talk about de-stemming and extracting juice?”
“More than anything. I think they will find the de-stemmer fascinating.”
Holly pursed her lips again, suppressing a chuckle.
“I also explained that we’ve begun harvesting already this year, even though our harvest festival isn’t until next weekend. I tried to explain that we plan festival dates months in advance, before we know exactly when the grapes will be ready. They didn’t seem to latch onto the concept though, so expect questions about that.”
We entered the building, and I attempted to draw the group’s attention to the big machine just inside the barn doors on the left side. As it turned out, the group did not find the de-stemmer fascinating, though that was truly what I expected. Marlo and her friend whispered the entire time I explained the process. Angelia didn’t take her eyes off Shane. Two girls kept tapping Toby on the shoulder with apparently nothing to say.
And Holly was wrong—there weren’t any questions about the harvest festival happening after harvest already began. They cared even less than we expected.
The scene reminded me of when I had to teach tenth grade English a couple years back. This group seemed to have a lot in common with apathetic fifteen-year-olds, though I guessed the amount of wine they consumed before the tour had something to do with that.
Reading the room, I rushed through explaining how we extract juice from grapes. I knew that what came next would be more interesting to them anyway.
I looked over at Holly who was standing next to me. “Want to talk about punching down the cap while I demonstrate?”
She nodded, and we led the group further into the barn toward a big vat of crushed grapes. As Holly started the explanation, I strode to the back wall and grabbed a tool hanging from hooks. It was a long pole with what looked like a big, flat disk on the end.
“Red grapes don’t have red juice,” Holly said. “Red wine’s color comes from the grape skins. Here we have Pinot Noir grapes—our first harvest of the year. It’s
a tough grape to grow in this region, but the microclimate at D’Angelo allows us to do it.” She motioned to the vat. “The grapes have already been through the de-stemmer, and now they’re all crushed up. This is called the must. It’s the grape juice with all the skins and seeds and stems in there. See how there’s all kinds of muck floating at the top? That’s called the cap. All the solids from the must—like the skins and seeds—accumulate on the top and hang out there.”
Holly glanced at me as I approached the vat again. I handed her the pole, and then I hoisted myself onto the side of the vat. It was about four feet high, and its walls were about two inches wide, so I stabilized myself by standing at the corner, one foot on each perpendicular side, toes pointed out diagonally. The group collectively murmured.
“In order to extract as much color from the skin as we can, we do what’s called punching down the cap,” Holly said. She handed the tool back to me. “Basically, we’re just mixing up the must. We do this three or four times a day until it’s to our liking.”
Holding the pole upright, I positioned the disk on top of the wine cap and punched down. As expected, it took some force. I pulled it up, and then punched down another section of the cap.
“That’s crazy,” a girl in the group said. “How are you not falling in?”
I tight-rope walked to another corner and punched down another part of the cap.
“She’s always been really athletic,” Shane said.
“Just practice,” I said under my breath as I punched down again and then moved to another corner of the vat.
“Standing on the edge of the vat isn’t required to punch the cap,” Holly said. “Most people—people who are taller than me and Jill—do it from the ground. But Jill’s way is more fun, and it’s become a D’Angelo tradition that at least one member of each generation can do it this way.”
“I bet it’s not that hard,” someone said.
I was pretty sure it was Marlo’s friend speaking, but I didn’t look up to check.
“Can we try?” she continued. “Do you take volunteers? Angelia, how about you? Want to try?”
“Sorry, no volunteers,” Holly said. “This does take a lot of practice, and it can actually be a bit dangerous—not just because it’s hard to balance on the edge like Jill is. There’s a lot of chemistry happening here. As the cap gets punched down, carbon dioxide is released into the air. Now, this vat isn’t very big—only eight feet by eight feet. And Jill has been doing this for years, so she knows what to do. But there are plenty of stories about people punching the cap of enormous vats who are overcome by the carbon dioxide, which makes them pass out, fall into the wine, and drown.”
I finished punching down the cap in the last corner and tight-rope walked over to Holly. She took the tool from me, and I jumped down.
Two guys in the back of the group half-heartedly clapped.
“You didn’t get the middle,” one of the clapping guys said.
“I’ll do that later,” I said. I couldn’t reach the middle without laying a plank across the vat to walk on, and it was time to get the group over to the cellar to discuss barreling.
“I’m bored,” one of the girls said. “Do we really have to be on this tour?”
Holly and I looked at each other. The question seemed to be directed at us, as though we were forcing them to be there.
“No,” I answered. “Of course, if you want to move on and check out the rest of Otto Viti, that’s no problem. Angelia? Shane? Are you ready to go?”
The bride and groom looked at each other. Angelia leaned into Shane and whispered loudly, “I thought we were going to get to stomp grapes and stuff. This is pretty boring.”
“Sorry, no grape stomping on tours, unfortunately,” Holly said with her don’t-worry-be-happy smile. “But next weekend is our harvest festival to celebrate crush season, and we’ll be doing some grape stomping if you want to come back then.”
The group started muttering, and slowly, turned around to walk out. No one actually said they were opting to end the tour, but the message was clear.
As Holly and I followed the group and closed the barn doors behind us, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out and saw a text from Stella.
Is the tour almost over? Can one of you finish it and send the other to save Aldo in the tasting room?
I groaned. Holly leaned over to read the text and huffed. “Why did she have Aldo take over in the tasting room?”
I shook my head and then looked around. Everyone from the bachelor-bachelorette party had scattered, without saying goodbye, so we were free to go.
I typed a response to Stella.
On our way.
THREE
Stella’s text message hadn’t been quite clear. Save Aldo in the tasting room didn’t really capture just what was happening when Holly and I finished power walking back to the winery’s main building.
We could hear it as we approached. Holly gave me a look somewhere between a grin and a grimace.
Inside, our seventy-five-year-old grandfather—the one who thought up the idea of Otto Viti in the first place and planted one of the first vineyards in the Temecula Valley over forty years ago—had garnered a crowd of middle-aged women wearing flamboyant hats around the bar and was leading them in a rousing rendition of Que Sera Sera. The problem with this, though, was that it was only he who knew all the words—everyone else only knew the three or four really popular lines. So, really, he was leading them in a rousing rendition of those three or four lines over and over.
Holly and I joined Aldo behind the bar and did the only thing we could do. We flung our arms around our grandfather’s shoulders and joined in. Aldo paused his singing long enough to kiss each of us on the cheek, and then after a verse or so, Holly and I broke off and leaned over the bar toward a few snazzy ladies and asked if they wanted to try some wine. Slowly, when the rest realized we were going back to tasting wine, the singing faded away and was replaced by spirited conversation and laughter.
“Nonno, I didn’t know Stella was sending you to watch the tasting room while we were gone,” I said to my grandfather.
“Oh, she wasn’t,” he said in his thickly-accented Italian voice. “But I saw Jamie walking over here from his office in the back, and I told him not to worry. I would come instead.”
I grinned. Aldo was short, balding, and weathered from years of working in the sun, but he was a firecracker. He loved people. He loved wine. He loved people drinking his wine. And even though he no longer oversaw wine production at the D’Angelo winery, he was here every day hanging out.
“I’m glad,” I said. “Everything is better when you are here, Nonno.”
And I really meant it. The man never had a bad day, and his happiness was contagious.
There was no time to chat about the strange tour we had just given as Aldo, Holly, and I poured wine and engaged with the guests. At D’Angelo—and at all the tasting rooms in Otto Viti, really—we tried hard to be present with the people who chose to spend time with us. Since we weren’t as busy as some of the big, mass-producing vineyards just a couple miles away where party BUSES could make it down the street, we could move more slowly. We also had pretty good wine knowledge to share with guests who wanted to talk. Holly and Aldo were the best, and I think I did pretty well. I never had to read the label of a wine bottle to answer a wine taster’s question at least. People who visited us were typically looking for an afternoon or evening of good wine and thoughtful conversation interspersed with fantastic meals and unique shopping, and we just wanted to help make that happen—without being snobby.
After an hour of pouring and chatting, Shane’s group was all but forgotten and most of the patrons who had been singing with Aldo had meandered away from the bar. Some were continuing conversations over the high top tables throughout the tasting room. Some were perusing the wall of framed pictures that showcased our family’s story. Some were at the opposite wall, squinting at the barrels. From their sporadic Oohs and Ahhs, I
figured they had just realized a Renaissance sonnet was fired into the face of each one.
My favorite barrel was the last one on the bottom row. It displayed Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94. One of the many lessons my mom taught me came from the last line of that poem—Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. Just because something is beautiful on the outside doesn’t mean it’s good on the inside. Aldo thought the poem was kind of a downer to put on a barrel in the tasting room, but I asked him to include it anyway. He couldn’t say no to his middle granddaughter. Of course, I was the only granddaughter who made a request for a specific sonnet in the first place.
With the crowd dissipating, Holly turned to Aldo. “So, are we ready for the crush festival next weekend?”
Aldo smiled and shrugged. “Eh, I think so, yes.” He shrugged again. “You know Jason and Stella. He will have all the wine ready to go. And Stella, she will make sure everyone is having fun.”
Holly and I exchanged smiles and nodded. Yep, Aldo pretty much nailed it. Our older sister and her husband always knocked these things out of the park without breaking a sweat. I wasn’t sure if Stella knew how to have fun herself, but she and Jason sure showed everyone else a good time.
“Now, the real question,” Aldo continued, “is the rest of Otto Viti ready? I do not know. I hope, yes.”
“Speaking of that,” I said, “Jules asked me to stop by The Sweet Spot this afternoon to sample some goodies she’s planned for the festival. Do you two mind if I disappear down to the bakery for a couple minutes?”
Aldo shooed me away. “Go, go. Me and Holly, we take care of the tasting room.”
Before I could say thank you, my phone buzzed. I pulled it out of my back pocket and checked the screen. It was Nico. I did some quick math. It was one o’clock in the afternoon in California, which meant it was ten o’clock at night in Italy. I waved to my sister and grandfather as I answered the call and headed for the door.
“Hey! Good timing,” I said into the phone. “I was just about to go see Jules, and now I can walk and talk at the same time.”