'What do you expect? I grew up here.'
'I guess,' He looked around the room. 'Do you ever help out?'
'Not really. I hang around sometimes, but they never wanted me to actually do any of the work. I never wanted to either.'
'Does your mother ever let you try any of the wines? In France, even little kids drink it. They have it with every meal. Do you guys do that?'
'No,' Penelope said simply. 'I don't drink.'
Dion was glad of that.
'Come on, let's go into the pressing room.'
Their tennis shoes sounded loud and absurdly squeaky on the silent tile.
Penelope led the way down the row of tanks and pushed open the white door at the far end. They passed through another, identical room filled with large, closed metal tanks, where Penelope nodded to two workers, then into the pressing room.
The pressing room was just as modern but not nearly as antiseptic and was the size of a small grocery store. The air here smelled of grape, and there were purple stains on the raised wood-slatted floor. Machines of various shapes and sizes were grouped according to type. Along the opposite wall were what looked like two electrical generators.
'As you can see, we don't all stand barefoot in a big barrel and stomp around to press the grapes. These are different types of presses. The women of the combine bought several kinds in order to experiment with different techniques. They all still work, and we usually end up using most of them at the height of the season, but we usually stick to these.' She tapped a long metal cylinder suspended in a sturdy frame.
'Air-pressure presses. They squeeze from the inside out instead of the other way around like the rest of these do. For our purposes, it makes a much better must.'
'Must?'
'The grape juice that we make into wine.'
'Oh.'
He followed her around the large room as she opened each press type and explained its workings. After that she led the way into a huge, damp, cavelike room in which hundreds of wooden barrels were stacked almost to the ceiling. This was what he'd though a winery would look like.
'This is just where we age the wines. After this the product is bottled and shipped out. I'd show you our bottling apparatus, but it's in another building, and it's closed up right now. The casks you're looking at now are arranged by year. We have wines in this room going back four, five, six years. My ... aunt Sheila does the testing to determine when the wines are ready.'
Dion took a deep breath. The air was rich, smelling of sweet grape and tart fermentation.
He thought of his mom.
What if he and Penelope eventually got married? What would happen if there was a winery in the family? If his mom had unlimited access to alcohol?
He did not even want to think about it.
'That's the basic tour, the non-technical tour. If you want a more in-depth look at the wine-making process, if you want to follow it from step to step, I'm sure I could get one of my aunts to take us around.'
He shook his head. 'No, that was good enough.' He smiled at her. 'You're really an excellent tour guide. Ever think of doing it professionally?'
'Very funny.'
They walked out of the room the way they'd come in, but exited the pressing room through a side door which led down a hall. There was only one door in the wall of the hallway. 'What's in there?' Dion asked as they passed.
'In there? That's the lab. But we can't go inside. That's Mother Sheila's territory, and she's very protective. Even I've never been in there.'
'What's the big secret?'
'Well, that's where they come up with new blends, new wines. That's where the serious brain work is done.'
They walked outside, squinting against the sudden brightness of the late afternoon sun. 'So where is your wine sold?' Dion asked. 'I haven't looked, but Kevin told me your wine's not sold in stores, that you have to mail- order it?'
Her face tightened. 'Did he call it 'Lezzie Label Wine'?'
'No,' Dion lied.
'Kevin Harte? He didn't mention the word lesbian in there somewhere?'
Dion smiled. 'Well, yeah, he did.'
She shook her head. 'We produce what are called 'specialty label' wines.
Kevin's right, they are mostly sold by mail order, but that's because most of our customers live out of state. Or out of the country.'
'What's a 'specialty label' wine?'
'It's a wine that's sold primarily to collectors or connoisseurs. It's the equivalent of, like, a limited-edition book. A lot of the smaller labels like ours couldn't afford to compete with the big names in the mass market, so we've sort of carved out our own niche. We produce the type of wine that it is just not economically feasible for a big winery to produce. Specialty labels usually specialize in wines made from obscure or exotic breeds or new hybrids of grape. Some use archaic or adventurous pressing, fermenting, or distilling techniques on their product.'
'Sounds like you're quoting from a textbook.'
She laughed. 'Close. Our sales brochure.'
'So what do you specialize in?'
'Basically, we make Greek wine, the type of wine they drank in ancient Greece, in Socrates' time and the days of Homer. Wine played an important role in the religious and social life of ancient Greece, but the classic techniques of wine making have been virtually abandoned in favor of the European style of wine making. It's really almost a lost art. The machines you saw in there are all modern, but they're used to duplicate those processes.' Penelope smiled shyly. 'That's in the brochure too.'
'That explains the architecture,' Dion said. 'And I assume that's why you're taking Mythology.'
She looked surprised. 'Not really. In fact, it never even occurred to me. But now that you mention it, yeah, I suppose it did influence me.'
They walked slowly across the lawn, toward the house. Dion glanced up, saw Penelope's mother and two of her aunts watching them through a window. They smiled and waved when they saw him, and he waved back, but it made him feel a little creepy. He couldn't help thinking that he and Penelope were being spied upon.
'It's getting late,' Dion said. 'I should be getting back.'
'This early?' Penelope sounded disappointed.
'My mom expects me home for dinner.'
Did she really? he wondered. From school he had called his mom at work, explaining that he was going over to Penelope's, telling her that he would be home by dinnertime. He had assumed that she would be home before he was, would have dinner waiting, but a nagging voice in the back of his mind kept saying that this would give her free time, that she would use this opportunity to do what she wanted and that she would not be home when he got there.
Stop it, he told himself.
'You always talk about your mother,' Penelope said. 'Your father doesn't live with you?'
Dion shook his head.
'Are your parents divorced?'
'No.' He looked at her, aware she was waiting for more, not sure how much he wanted to reveal. He took a deep breath, took the plunge. 'I
don't know who my father was,' he admitted. He glanced away from her, toward the house, ashamed, embarrassed, though he knew it was something over which he'd had no control.
'But doesn't--'
