decision somewhere between a crap shoot and a matter of scientific judgment.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“Let’s test Brix.”
He got the refractometer, a beaker, and a small piece of equipment that looked like a garlic press. Brix measured sugar content of the grapes, probably the most important factor in deciding when they were ready to pick. He crushed several grapes until a straw-colored liquid dripped into a beaker. Dozens of tiny black flies swarmed around us, coating the hood of the Gator like an ink spill. Yellow jackets, excited by the newly released sugar liquid, dive-bombed us and strafed the vines.
“These grapes have had plenty of hang time,” Quinn said swatting a bee, as he swirled juice in the flask. “I don’t think we ought to leave it any later than the day after tomorrow to harvest.”
He poured a few drops onto the refractometer and he closed the top. Then he pointed it at the horizon and looked through the eyepiece.
“Read that,” he said, handing it to me. I squinted toward the light.
“Twenty point eight. Or point six.”
“That’s what I got.” He shook his head. “If this heat keeps up, it could go to twenty-two in the next day or so. It’ll be too high for a Virginia Chardonnay. You don’t have the sunshine California does. Out there we got too much sugar to deal with. I prefer a wine on the drier side like you get here.”
“What if Bobby still has us shut out of the winery?” I swiped at more buzzing insects.
“I’m working on it.” He pulled a pair of half-glasses from the pocket of his Hawaiian shirt and put them on. I watched while he did some calculations, then I got the two bottles of cold water I’d taken from the refrigerator. They were already tepid. I handed one to him and opened the other for myself.
“You got any idea where the root stock for these vines came from?” he asked. “And when they were put in?”
“I think these might have been put in when the vineyard was a few years old—but I’m not sure.” I splashed water on the back of my neck and face. “Isn’t that information in Jacques’s files?”
“If it was, it isn’t anymore. Somebody’s been through them. They’re—well, I guess you’d call it, incomplete.”
He meant Leland. “My mother kept her own garden journals. Not just what was planted here, but also the flower and vegetable gardens, too. She was very meticulous. I’ll have a look.”
“That’d be good.”
He stuffed his glasses back in his shirt pocket and squatted down, cutting another bunch of grapes from a different vine. “Damnit. Damn crows. And deer.” There were empty spots on several vines along the row where the grapes had been stripped down to the stems.
“Why didn’t you put out the owls?” I asked. My mother had a huge collection of owl statues she put along the fences that surrounded the vineyard. They frightened the birds off. Sort of.”
“Statues? I didn’t know about them. Where are they?”
“The smokehouse. I’m surprised Hector didn’t remember.”
“We’d taken to shooting them. The crows, I mean. Until recently.” He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t have to. “Let’s get some samples from other parts of the block. I’ll do TA and pH back at the house to be sure, but I don’t think it’s going to change anything about when we pick.”
TA is titratable acidity and is a measure of the total acid in the grape juice—pH is sort of related to titratable acidity and is the third important component for determining ripeness. If the pH is too high, the grapes could be overripe. The ideal time to harvest is when there’s a good balance between the sweetness and the acidity in the wine, and that could change in the space of a day.
He started the Gator. “I had a call from Elvis Harmon. Seems our neighbor lost a calf,” he said. “Got through a hole in the electric fence. I promised we’d keep an eye out for it.”
“If it’s been too long the foxes probably got it, poor thing.”
“Or the coyotes.”
“We don’t have coyotes in Virginia.”
“They’re moving into the area. We’ve got coyotes, honey.”
He clipped three more bunches of grapes from other vines in the Chardonnay block, then we headed out into an open field toward the larger of our two apple orchards. Quinn kicked the Gator into third gear and we roared bumpily across the hard-packed terrain.
He slowed down as we came to the orchard with its uneven rows of trees, as pleasantly untidy as the vines were orderly and well trained. Apple-picking time began in September and stretched into October, coinciding with the harvest of our reds. A few men from the vineyard crew were sent to the orchard to pick and the apples were made into sparkling cider.
My mother, like Jefferson, believed in experimenting in the garden, and the orchards had been no exception. We had at least a half dozen kinds of apples—the usual Jonathans, Winesaps, and Red Delicious, but also the more exotic Ginger Golds, Cox’s Orange Pippin, and Jefferson’s own favorite, the Esopus Spitzenburg, which despite its homely name, tasted sweetly and smelled of orange blossoms.
We passed the dry-stacked stone wall at the end of the orchard and drove down an allée of cherry trees my mother had planted as seedlings. My favorite time of year to come to this part of the vineyard was spring, when the sprays of pale pink blooms made it look as though the tree branches were covered in a lace curtain. Some years the blossoms didn’t last long and on windy days there would be a pink blizzard that stripped the trees and left a carpet of petals on the ground.
“When did you start working here?” I asked Quinn.
He smiled. “In time to see these in bloom. They were real pretty. I like dogwoods.”
“They’re cherry trees. You’re in George Washington’s backyard.”
“I thought they were dogwoods.”
“We’ve got dogwoods, too. There’s a grove by the Merlot block. My French mother was very patriotic. It’s our state tree.”
“Ah,” he said. “The Merlot block.”
“That’s where Leland…?”
“Yup.”
“I’d like to see it, please.”
He swung around and we drove back in the direction we’d come from. The Merlot block was nearest to the road, not far from where Sycamore Lane split into a “Y” behind Quinn’s and Hector’s houses. We drove by the dairy barn and the dogwood grove without speaking, but I saw him studying the trees. After a moment he stopped at a post marked “A46, R4” and turned off the motor. All vineyards have a numbering system so it’s possible to keep precise track of the location of a trellis needing repairs, a section of vines with yellowed leaves, or so we’d know where the workers had left off pruning for the day.
There was a small rosebush at the end of the row. It appeared recently planted, and it wasn’t doing well in the heat. There were no blooms.
“Here?” I asked.
“Not right here. In the middle of the row.” He climbed off the Gator and I followed. He wanted to walk, not drive.
Here the rows were about as long as football fields, with the vines planted about three feet apart. We got to the spot and Quinn knelt down, pointing to a section of trellis. “That’s where the vine came down and we had to fix the wires and put in a new post.”
I leaned on my cane and knelt next to him, touching two of the frayed red hay bailing ties on the bottom wire where the vines had broken away. You couldn’t tell anything anymore, except for the newness of the post, which would weather after a couple of seasons. Then there’d be nothing left to physically mark the place where Leland had died.
“Who planted that rosebush?”
“Hector’s wife.”
“I’ll have to thank her.”
“That’d be nice. Hey, are you all right?”
I nodded.
